I stumbled onto a Macintosh Portable and have already replaced the floppy drive and the battery.
It runs now but I could REALLY REALLY use a working hard drive for this thing. Its the odd Conner drive, and unfortunately mine wont actually work when needed (spins down when being formatted or read)
If somebody could help me out, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks,
Britt
Anyone know if the internal IDE is able to boot using a compact flash to IDE adapter?
Google didn't help me here. Closest I could find for non-standard IDE was the Powerbook 150 CF adapter
Just seems like it would be a longer-lasting solution...unless you want to keep the Portable's internals historically accurate.
unfortunately there are two issues with this:
*For OS booting and general activity, CF isnt suited for that task. Reason is, each sector on a flash drive can only be written to around 200,000 times before degredation occurs in the SDRAM chips used in CF and flash drives. The alternative, of course, is a IBM MicroDrive.
*The Mac portable isnt standard SCSI, nor is it IDE. Its a 34-pin SCSI connection with most of the redundant grounds omitted. Takes the amount of available drives for use with the Portable down to very few.
Whoops...my bad. Googling for the Conner CP-3044 (noted as a potential replacment drive by LEM) comes up with a lot of vendors flogging it as an IDE.
Break out the cable crimper:
http://antinode.org/mac/port_scsi.html
An outfit called MicroMac "sells" a pre-assembled version:
http://www.micromac.com/products/portable_scsi.html
For $35. However, MicroMac is well known for having a questionable reputation, so buyer beware if you go that route.
--Peace
Sweet! I hadn't though to even look for something like that. I may give it a go if I ever fix my Portable Sad Mac issue. I'm fairly sure the HD is a goner anyway, and I'm not sure if it's causing the problem, or if it's old caps somewhere.
I ran into the hex codes and what they mean, i have to dig that up again.
you should grab those codes and put them up.
Micromac is well known for not existing
I wonder who pays their webhosting bills.
The webpage has always given me these strange mental images of a crazy, broken old hermet sitting in a darkened basement surrounded by dusty boxes of worthless electronics, just waiting for the phone to ring just *one more time*...
--Peace
Well, I seem to believe that the site is down too--I emailed support and havent recieved any infomration.
I dont want my credit info going to some email address to sit around for any length of time.
Come on ... You've got to admit that you want a 75 mhz 603e logic board upgrade for your Performa 630, and $449 is a very reasonable price for such a cutting edge piece of technology.
thats the other blatently obvious hint that the site isnt 'active'
I bit the bullet and bought an original Conner drive.