I have hard drives a little older than that, which work just fine with an IDE-SATA adapter. It looks like 2.5" SCSI adapters do exist, although they are much rarer:
https://vintagemacmuseum.com/reading-powerbook-2-5-scsi-hard...
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
191–200 of 272 posts
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#192A few years ago, I spent a fair share of time trying to copy files from and to a Macintosh Plus. I decided to use a 100 MB ZIP drive (actually two of them, SCSI for the Mac Plus and USB for a modern computer) and later a serial port connection with terminal software [1]. Now there's a much better and cheaper option: BlueSCSI [2]. It's a SCSI HDD emulator that allows to mount .img files stored on a SD card as HDD disk…
I dreamt of Zip drives back in the days - I never quite understood white they didn’t become standard, much like usb drives would become later.
Zip drives malfunctioned too much. The "click of death" they used to call it.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#193Years ago bootstrapping 4.1BSD on a vax730 (a very mini variant of the 11/780) all I had was single disk removable rl02 type platters. And had to do a sequence of
dd seek=
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#194people have done floppySD card emulators for over a decade such as here (https://jimatwood.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/sd-card-hxc-flopp...)
It'd take a bit of work but you could probably just go straight to USB and maybe even have some file system trickery where you misreport the amount of "free space" as the host os copies to the "1.44MB" floppy basically by opportunistically "removing and freeing" sectors from the virtual disk transparently, essentially always reporting 1.44MB. It's such a dirty and beautiful hack if it would work.
If I were doing this, this is essentially the only approach I'd actually be interested in.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#195Appletalk is the way to go, the drivers are built in and apple did a good job of maintaining compatibility over a long timeframe. I have similar issues moving stuff between a IIGS and modern machines. Its possible to move stuff with floppy emulators, via scsi , or just raw serial, but the simplicity of having a Mac with both appletalk and ethernet, allows one to drag and drop entire file hierarchies between the targe…
Setting aside the internal connector, most Mac laptops (and all modern Macs) have a Target Mode[1] that exposes the internal hard drive externally as a SCSI, FireWire, Thunderbolt, or USB device you can mount on another computer.
In this case, it's a PowerBook Duo with a SCSI disk, so you'd need a Duo Dock or similar[2], a HDI-30-to-something-a-little-more-standard adapter [3], and whatever combination of cables, converters, and controllers are required to connect a parallel SCSI device into a more modern system.
For example, if you have a machine with a PCI Express slot (or Thunderbolt PCI Express enclosure), I'd recommend any of the LSI Logic Ultra320 adapters available on eBay for Assuming all these things are in order, connect the Macs with a SCSI cable, hold down T while booting the PowerBook to enter target disk mode, and answer no to any prompts your OS may display offering to format the unreadable disk you just attached!
As for accessing the HFS filesystem, assuming macOS, my preferred method would be:
1. Create a raw disk image:
$ hdiutil create -tgtimagekey diskimage-class=CRawDiskImage -srcdevice disk .img
2. Shut down the PowerBook.
3. Make a backup copy of the image in case something goes wrong.
4. Install Mac OS 9 in qemu[5] and attach the image.
5. Use Alsoft PlusMaker[6] in Mac OS 9 to do an in-place conversion of the filesystem on the image from HFS to HFS+ (download the first file, use StuffIt[7] to extract the file and Toast[8] to mount the image, and run PlusMaker directly from the image to avoid being prompted for a serial number).
6. Shut down Mac OS 9 ("Shut Down" is in the Mac OS 9 Finder's "Special" menu).
7. Mount the resulting HFS+ image in (current) macOS (double-click in Finder, "hdiutil attach .img" from a command prompt, etc.).
Other options exist, but this is the easiest full-fidelity one that comes to mind.
As a bonus, you'll now have an emulated Mac OS 9 system that should run most of the applications from the original PowerBook's hard drive on your modern Mac.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn/tn1...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_Duo#Docking_stations
[3] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081SAIS2/
[4] https://www.broadcom.com/support/download-search?pg=Legacy+P...
[5] https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/GuestOperatingSystems/Ma...
[6] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/19-plusoptimizer-plusmak...
[7] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/809-stuffit-deluxe-1-5-x...
[8] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1724-toast-5-titanium
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#196A few years ago, I spent a fair share of time trying to copy files from and to a Macintosh Plus. I decided to use a 100 MB ZIP drive (actually two of them, SCSI for the Mac Plus and USB for a modern computer) and later a serial port connection with terminal software [1]. Now there's a much better and cheaper option: BlueSCSI [2]. It's a SCSI HDD emulator that allows to mount .img files stored on a SD card as HDD disk…
I dreamt of Zip drives back in the days - I never quite understood white they didn’t become standard, much like usb drives would become later.
They sorta did in the Apple world. Maybe not quite a standard, but quite common. Apple shipped several Macs with (optionally) built-in Zip drives in the late 1990s.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming environments were available of course, but none were built-in. The fact that the external floppy doesn't work is the main problem here. I think a better solution would have been to use the serial port rather than the modem port to send a fax. Serial-to-USB adapters are easy to find.
>I think a better solution would have been to use the serial port rather than the modem port to send a fax. From what I could Google, that laptop doesn't have a traditional RS-232 serial port but a DIN-8 RS-422 serial port. Still, it's serial, it's standard and very well documented, easy to acquire and easy to hook up. I'd definitely would have used that instead to transfer data, especially since I could find USB to…
The RS-422 ports are backwards compatible with RS-232, so you don't even need a special RS-422 adapter to talk to them.
The RS-422 support is just there to support LocalTalk networking.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple used 8-pin mini DIN connectors for serial. The author might not have had the right cable.
Classic macs had RS-422 not RS-232 ports so you'll need more than just a dumb cable to get it working with a PC.
The Mac RS-422 ports are backwards compatible with RS-232, dumb cables work fine. No Mac users were buying special RS-422 modems back in the day, we all used standard PC RS-232 modems and they worked fine with just a dumb cable. Even Apple's own serial printers were just RS-232.
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#199I would suggest you to tap the inputs to the speaker to get preout equivalent of audio signal using audio transformers that support the input impedance equal to the speaker impedance. Once pre out is achieved, then it is easy to record
Re: How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
#200I like the idea of using a SCSI adapter or cable and then making a hard drive image, which can then be booted in an emulator or mounted in Linux (or NetBSD, or older MacOS?) using the hfs filesystem. Could also use hfstools.
Making a localtalk adapter is also a cool idea. There seem to be localtalk implementations (tashtalk) for PIC microcontrollers. Someone even made a localtalk-wifi gateway.