Category: Uncategorized

Less is more.

• a 2.5″ HDD with macOS High Sierra installed originally from an MBP Early-2011 does not boot properly when used with a MacPro5,1 – you’ll have to select the drive and run Startup Disk > Restart for the system to “bless” it.

• Mac OS X Lion on a MacPro5,1 requires the DVD installer (Recovery errors out even with a valid iTunes credentials). Tried the date modification workaround but could not get that to work.

• iLife ’08 = OS X 10.4.11
• iLife ’09 = OS X 10.5.8
• iLife ’11 = OS X 10.6/10.7

• Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 and Adobe Illustrator 10.0.3 = OS X 10.4.11 (iMac G5)

• Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Illustrator CS6 = Windows 10

• Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Illustrator CS6 requires OS X 10.6/10.7 will NOT run on OS X higher than 10.8 (Intel-CPU required) – also required is Java SE 6 which is provided by Apple.

• Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.6 will not run older releases of Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator – check requirements before making any purchases.

• when Windows 10 is installed on the primary drive (iMac, for example, Disk Utility is too soft when trying to nuke the data) solution: open Terminal and type: diskutil eraseDisk FILE_SYSTEM DISK_NAME DISK_IDENTIFIER

• enable ACHI and UEFI for laptops/desktops that support both features before installing Windows 10

Opened up a used AirPort Time Capsule 802.11n (2nd Generation) unit to discover it has shiny 1TB @westerndigital Black Caviar drive with the Apple logo. I pulled it out and Airport Utility immediately detected the anomaly of the missing drive but provided an “ignore it” option.

The Toshiba Satellite 325CDS was sold back in 1996. It sports a 233Mhz Pentium processor, PCMCIA bay (2-slots), 3.5 floppy disk drive and a CD-ROM drive that doesn’t support DVDs. I was fortunate to acquire a well kept unit for about $25 – it had Windows 2000 installed on the primary 2.5″ IDE harddrive.

Via Twitter, @sheridancompute suggested FreeBSD 7.3 would be the highest version of the operating system this Toshiba laptop would support.

So I went ahead and pulled the hard drive out and plugged it into a PATA/USB adapter cable connected to my primary FreeBSD server. I booted off a FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE disc, dumped a fresh installation on the drive and did a quick freebsd-update. Updated /etc/fstab to point from /dev/da0 (external USB) to /dev/ad0 (Toshiba) and plugged it back into the laptop. It worked like a charm. For now, no Internet connectivity until I can find a compatible PCMCIA-to-Ethernet card.

There is no direct software upgrade path to mac OS High Sierra (10.13.x) for an iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2011). Besides that, major updates usually have BOOT ROM / SMC action involved. Can’t miss those! 🙂

Internet Recovery managed to grab OSX Lion (10.7), updated to the latest then my backup copy of Mountain Lion (10.8) to continue. Unfortunately, the App Store dropped an error every time I attempted to install Update 10.8.5 combo. The workaround was downloading Updates 10.8.1 through 10.8.5 and manually installing them one at a time.

After 10.8.5 installed, I ran Update using the App Store to get the latest 10.8.x updates but this time around, I didn’t encounter any errors.

Continued to run through mac OS Sierra (10.12) installer and rebooting several times to fetch the latest updates.

Finally, I hooked up a drive with an existing fully patched High Sierra (10.13.6) system using a SATA-to-USB cable (with power), rebooted and used it to format (APFS) the built-in 500GB harddrive on the iMac before dumping a fresh installation of High Sierra.

Just for fun, I booted off a drive with an existing fully patched Windows 10 (version 1909) system without using BootCamp Assistant. It worked as expected.

In the end, my trusty #FreeBSD server running off an old Dell Dimension 518 was a big help giving me access to storage/files i needed.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, Apache/WebDAV still works. 🙂

Just recently got an iMac G3 DV 400Mhz and I want to repurpose it to run FreeBSD as light-weight server at home (rsync, squid, reverse SSH tunnels, et al)

Hardware Overview:

• PowerMac 2,1
• PowerPC 750 (83.2)
• Boot ROM Version: 4.1.9f1
• RAM: 384MB
• CPU Speed: 400Mhz

Here’s what I have tried.

Used the ppc (boot only) ISO of FreeBSD 10.4, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 (all -RELEASE) to boot off a CD – it goes through orange screen with all OFW stuff, I hit Enter then it goes through the boot process but then all of a sudden, the machine reboots.

All 4 major releases render the same results.

In terms of booting off a CD with all the attempts I’ve made to get into the FreeBSD installer, I tried the built-in slot-loading drive and an external CD/DVD drive (USB).

FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE, -STABLE and 13-CURRENT gets stuck but doesn’t reboot and halts. Links to screen shots are below: https://danskoya.com/freebsd-ppc/boot1.jpg https://danskoya.com/freebsd-ppc/boot2.jpg https://danskoya.com/freebsd-ppc/boot3.jpg

I know this is unrelated, but I managed to install OpenBSD 6.6 ppc on the same machine using the same booting method.

Anyhow, I sent an email to the freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org mailing list just in case someone can provide some pointers to resolve my installation issues. – https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ppc/2020-March/011589.html