Wallstreet PCMCIA hard disk not booting with Mac OS X?!?

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Level 1

4 points

Wallstreet PCMCIA hard disk not booting with Mac OS X?!?

Wanted to set up a PC Card disk drive as a servicing device.
Installing and booting Mac OS 9 works fine.
Installing Mac OS X 10.2 performs without problems too, but the PC Card disk drive refuses to do the initial boot, resulting in a blank screen (Mac OS 9 flavour) with the mouse freezed in the upper left corner.
alt-ctrl-shift-fn done, PRAM-Reset too, even Open Firmware reset.
Any clues or tricks I don´t know of?

PowerBook G3 Wallstreet 300MHz, Mac OS X (10.2.x)

Posted on Mar 27, 2008 10:54 AM

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Answer 1

jpl

Level 7

28,285 points

Mar 27, 2008 12:08 PM in response to trabu44oi

trabu,

Welcome to the Discussions.

I also have a PC card HD made by MCE which works fine in 9.x on my Wallstreet but not 10.x. Apparently the necessary drivers to support this interface are not included in 10.x. Since it was not a very widely used hardware configuration, Apple chose not to support it.

Interestingly, it is firmware during startup, both in the powerbook and PC card, that allow these HDs to boot. Once the PC card HD initializes, something is missing in 10.x which prevents the boot to proceed. I also do not believe the 8GB limit for Wallstreets running OSX on internal HDs applies (see below).

When I was booted to 10.2.4 on my Wallstreet, the PC card HD would mount on the desktop with a PC card icon and any attempt to open a file or folder on the PC card HD would result in a freeze. I believe I still had 9.x installed on the external HD.

This is what MCE has to say:

"(Note: While the Transport Pro FireWire/USB Kit is compatible with Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, the Transport PC Card Kit is only compatible with Mac OS 9 and does not operate under Mac OS X.)"

The only way to boot a Wallstreet from another HD is via the SCSI port or a media bay HD. You can still buy one for $69 without the HD:
http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&ProductCode=XPKIT&Category_Code=CLRNCHD&ProductCount=3

Message was edited by: jpl

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