The Backroad to Civilization RetroChallenge 2024 October 2nd-3rd, 2024 - Days Two and Three Photos: https://pixelfed.sdf.org/i/web/post/747282229286820752 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! https://pixelfed.sdf.org/i/web/post/747435703340794168 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