Options to retrieve data from old Firewire Macs and devices

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Options to retrieve data from old Firewire Macs and devices

I have some ~15-year-old Macs that I want to retrieve data from, as well as an old Mac-formatted external FireWire 800 hard drive. (I also have a 1st-gen iPod with FireWire 400, but I think all the music from that is on the mini.)

I want to transfer their data to a 2017 MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt 3 ports.

For the hard drive, it looks like Apple sells a FireWire 800-to-Thunderbolt adapter. But this appears to be for Thunderbolt 2, and I would also need to buy a Thunderbolt 2-to-3 adapter. Is this correct? Will this work?
The old Macs are a G4 mini (FireWire 400 port) and a Power Mac G5 tower (FireWire 800 and 400 ports). What are my options here? I remember you used to be able to mount a FireWire Mac as an "external hard drive" using Target Disk Mode. Can I mount the G5 on my MacBook Pro using the same two adapters as above? (I'd also need to add a FireWire cable here; the hard drive already has a cable.)
I'm not sure how to handle the G4 mini with a FireWire 400 port, because the Apple adapter is FireWire 800. Suggestions? Can I chain a 800-to-400 adapter to the other two? (This is looking like a Frankenstein solution...)
Alternatively, I could try to rip out the old hard drives, put them into Thunderbolt 3 external enclosures, and plug them directly into the MacBook Pro. Will that work, or are the filesystem formats so old that they're no longer recognized by modern Mac OS?

Are there other options I'm overlooking, or pitfalls I should be considering? If this won't work for some reason, are there any services I could send my hardware to, who could do the data recovery for me?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jul 31, 2020 10:50 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 31, 2020 4:40 PM in response to oodata

Correct. You can use those two adapters together.
In theory yes you should be able to put those PPC Macs into Target Disk Mode to access them from your 2017 laptop. However, I have seen a couple recent reports that may indicate that recent versions of macOS may not be able to mount older Apple Partition Map (APM) drives found on PPC Macs.
You will either need to use a FireWire 800 to 400 adapter in addition to the others or you will need to use a FireWire 800 to 400 cable.
Most of the older PPC hard drives are IDE based drives and not SATA based drives and you are going to find it difficult to locate a compatible enclosure these days. Besides these drives are so slow that just about any adapter will work with no performance penalty. I recommend getting a USB universal hard drive adapter that will allow you to connect both IDE & SATA drives, but also the 3.5" & 2.5" drives as well. Using this type of adapter can save you from needing to purchase all of those Frankenstein adapters/cables.

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-USB-SATA-IDE-Adapter/dp/B00D76J1KO

If recent versions of macOS really cannot mount these older APM partitioned PPC drives, then I would suggest using your G5 to perform the transfers to an external drive formatted as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled). At least you should be able to create a bootable older macOS/OSX drive which can be used to read the older PPC drives and still write to the newer Intel Mac GUID partitioned hard drives which your 2017 laptop can read.

Another possibility would be to use Linux to access the older PPC drives to copy the files to another shared location. However, Linux may not be able to retain all the meta information in the files which may be important especially in pictures.

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Options to retrieve data from old Firewire Macs and devices

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