The Backroad to Civilization

RetroChallenge 2024

October 2nd-3rd, 2024 - Days Two and Three

It's two, two, two updates in one!

What a day... I made the decision to tackle the Powerbook Duo 280c first,

which proved to be less straightforward than I thought (I'm out of

practice and it showed today).

The first thing I did was back up the 280c's dying 320mb hard drive to

a 2Gb Jaz drive. The Jaz disk sounded worse than the hard drive it was

backing up, but the process eventually (and successfully) completed in

about an hour.

I lost another hour trying to find my Torx bit set, before giving up and

using a flathead screwdriver to take out the Torx screws holding the 280c

together. Thankfully, I managed not to strip any of them!

The next step was to remove the 320mb HD from the 'book and install the

BlueSCSI board I got for Father's Day. The process was simple, and I had

the board installed in a couple of minutes.

The first problem arose when I went to insert the SD card into the unit...

I had prepared a 32gb SD card, but the Powerbook-sized BlueSCSI board had

a MICRO SD slot. FUCK! I had to hunt for a device that had a Micro SD

card I could steal, and found a nice 32gb one in my old Android tablet.

Got the thing to format nicely, copied over the 4gb blank hard drive image

I'd created, only to have the process freeze while copying over the Mac OS

8.1 Install CD.

After removing the card and rebooting my Windows laptop, I found the 32gb

card had died. Couldn't get Windows to detect the card, couldn't format

it with the SD Association's magic formatting util... couldn't get Linux

or MacOs to detect the card either.

Eventually, I gave up on trying to get the card to work, and stole the 8gb

MicroSD card from my Super Famicom's Super UFO 8 SD cart. I formatted the

MicroSD card as exFAT, copied over the 4gb blank image and the Mac OS 8.1

Install CD image, and inserted into the BlueSCSI.

The Mac OS splash screen appeared.

I'd booted from the CD image successfully!

The OS recognized the 4gb image and prompted me to initialize it, which I

did. Once done, I kicked off the 8.1 install and sat back while the

installer did its thing.

Once the OS had installed, I rebooted the 280c... only for the

thing to boot from the CD image again. What the Hell?

I went into the Control Panel, selected the hard drive image as my

Startup Disk, and rebooted.

The Duo booted from the CD image AGAIN! Qu'est-ce que fuck?! I then

verified everything had installed to the HD image, could read and write to

the image... and rebooted again.

It booted from the CD image again.

OK, so, the HD image isn't bootable for some reason. I turned the 280c

off, yanked the MicroSD card, put it back into my Windows laptop, renamed

the CD image so it wouldn't register, ejected and reinserted into the

280c, powered on and...

No splash screen. I got the disk-with-question-mark screen that shows

when no bootable drives are detected.

I thought to myself, "CJ, wasn't there some kind of limit to bootable

drive or partition sizes on older versions of Mac OS? Didn't you run into

this exact issue 20 years ago when upgrading your late, lamented Power Mac

6100/60AV?"

"Well, I'm glad ONE of us has a good memory," I laughed. I was right, I

(eventually) remembered having issues getting older Macs to boot from

drives larger than 2gb. I can't remember why, as I haven't had to rebuild

a classic Mac in, yeah, probably 20 years. Regardless, I fired up the

Windows laptop again, used DiskJockey to create a 320mb image using the

Powerbook Duo 280c option, and threw the card back into the BlueSCSI

before attempting the install again.

No boot. So I smacked myself in the forehead, put the SD card back into

the Windows laptop, re-renamed the Mac OS 8.1 CD image so the fucking

BlueSCSI would detect it, popped it back into the 280c, and booted.

Installed 8.1 on the 320mb image, rebooted... and...

SUCCESS!

The Duo booted into Mac OS 8.1 from the 320mb image.

Cool. I shut the 280c off, yanked the card, created a blank 2gb image,

popped the card back into the Duo, and began the install process again,

this time on the 2gb image.

SUCCESS!

Around 11 pm, my Duo 280c booted into Mac OS 8.1 from the 2gb image.

Part One was completed, so I began Part Two. I pulled the card, popped it

back into my laptop, copied the BlueSCSI Bootstrap image file to the card,

created a few text files on the card per the BlueSCSI wiki, popped the

card back into the Duo, and rebooted.

From there, I installed the DaynaPort drivers to enable the BlueSCSI's

wifi adapter, and was soon using Netscape Navigator 3 to browse

gopher.club!

At this point, it was well after midnight, so I called it a night.

It's October 3rd, 7 am as I write this. I'll be working on the Duo later

today after running errands with my wife (as I seem to do every time I

take a vacation from work). Today's goal is to complete Part Three:

re-install all my apps and data from the Jaz drive. Once I've done that,

I'll put the Duo back together and call it complete.

The plan is to use the Duo to enter the rest of my RetroChallenge entries

on this Gemlog and/or Gopher hole.

I'll hopefully have an update later today.

-conceitedjerk