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The Road Warrior Mailbag - January 15, 2007

Wallstreet upgrade problem
Re: USB 2.0 card and WallStreet
From The Road Warrior Archive The Road Warrior - Repartitioning My iBook's Hard Drive With Drive Genius

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Wallstreet upgrade problem

From Greg Speas

Hi Charles,

I'm experiencing a problem following a BlueChip Powerlogix G3 500 upgrade on my Series II 233 Wallstreet running 9.2.2. I installed the board according to the book, except afterwards when the instructions call for the reboot, something strange happened. On reboot there was the normal chime, instead of the bar showing that the rom was being copied to the new processor and then another reboot; instead, my Wallstreet just started up as normal. I checked the Apple Profiler, and it showed the 500Mhz and the 1MB backside cache, so I assumed everthing was normal. I also had bought a DVD module from the same fellow, and had an extension problem with it.

Turned out it was the Digidesign output extension that conflicted with the Apple DVD Player. It's fine now. This morning before I went to work, I tried to shut down from the finder menu and the computer froze completely and I had to force restart. After several more tests, I tried to find some answers on the web, but not much is out there. One site suggested rebooting with extensions off but that didn't work either. I tried techtool to rebuild the Desktop but it crashed as soon as I hit run. I then found out that I couldn't restart either without a crash. I rebooted off my 9.1 install disk and I was able to shut down and restart from it. As for the PowerlOgix software, I only received a copy of the Flash Utility, but not the Profiler or the CPU Director. I haven't been able to find them on the web anywhere. I had read that the backside cache speed in some instances should be reduced to 200 from 250 to avoid crashes. Everything else as far as I know works well. My computer is much faster, but I certainly didn't have this problen before the upgrade. Have you heard of any similar experiences such as this, and do you know where I might find the rest of the software for this processor, or a similar utility?

Thanks,

Greg

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Hi Greg;

One possibility is that the upgrade doesn't like the RAM you have installed. If you have non-Apple RAM in any slot, it's worth a try to remove it (so long as you have some Apple OEM RAM to use instead) and see if that improves the issue.

I haven't heard of this exact problem before, but WallStreets are generally more finicky than Lombards and especially Pismos with respect to modifications.

Unfortunately, Powerlogix no longer sells the Bluechip upgrades for PowerBooks. It's still worth contacting their tech support to see if they have a download site for obsolete software. Upgrade support software from Daystar (MACHSpeed) or Sonnet might work, but that's just a wild guess.

Adjusting the backside cache speed may also prove the charm, but I have no experience with that.

Charles

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Re: Wallstreet upgrade problem

From Greg Speas

Hi Charles,

Thanks for getting back to me. I was mistaken in my report to you. I actually booted with the OS 9 Base extension set and it didn't work. I later booted without any extensions and the shutdown and restart worked. I then thought it was an extension problem. I have conflict catcher, and as the test progressed, every reboot came up with the "Your computer did not shut down properly..." I thought this was unusual with CC, but the test continued in the two phases; one asks you if the problem still exists, and the other asked you to recreate the problem. About halfway through the test, the second phase reboot froze as the extensions were loading. I rebooted and then told CC that the problem still existed. It finally narrowed down the culprits as an Iomega driver and Powerbook G3 modem were incompatible with each other.

The shutdown menu and restart were

working, and CC said it would change the startup order. After the test and the final reboot, i remained with the same problem. Freeze at restart or shutdown. It will work without extensions. I'm not sure why the startups during the test froze with CC. I guess I'll have to test the extensions manually. I replaced the Finder from a backup dis and that didn't help. Let me know if you think of anything. Thanks a lot.

Greg

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Hi Greg;

Good ol' Conflict Catcher. Extension conflicts are part of the Mac OS Classic experience I don't miss a bit with OS X.

I expect you've tried disabling the Iomega driver.

You could also revert to Apple extensions only in Extensions Manager and then add things one by one.

Did you remember to trash the Finder Preferences? I've found that can sometimes clear up strange behavior.

Then there's always a clean system reinstall.

Charles

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Re: Wallstreet upgrade problem

From Greg Speas

Hello again, and again, thanks for keeping up with me. I'm not a very savvy troubleshooter unfortunately, but on the plus side, it's because I've had very few problems with my Wallstreet.

Yes indeed, I found a website that mentioned trashing a list of certain preferences including the Finder, (I had replaced the Finder from a backup to no avail) and it did the trick! There was around seven of them, but you're probably correct that it was the Finder Preferences.

The article said that some would restore by themselves, but I would need to zap the PRAM to restore the rest. Hooray! All I have left now to do is to install OS X. I have Jaguar back in the States, but it seems Panther is a better choice. A friend of mine burned two DVD disks for me, but the DVD player couldn't read the DVD-ROMS. I have both versions of XpostFacto 3 and 4 having read one of your articles advising to use 3. I have 3.0b8. He also had some CD-ROMS of Panther, but The DVD wouldn't read those either, possibly due to some burning error.

My old CD-ROM did read the CDs, but at the beginning of the installation, I received a disk error. Does the Apple DVD player read DVD-ROMs? Do you need the DVD encoding card to do this, or is that just for the DVDplayer? I've read that OS X does not support the DVD player, but what about DVD-ROMs?

The Player itself works great on commercial DVDs, but doesn't seem to want to play burned ones. My friend is going to bring the original DVDs over for Panther, and I'll try that. I may just have to buy CDs of Panther on eBay. As for the Bluchip upgrade, it seems to work great so far. I was thinking about the unusual reboot after the installation of the card that had a normal chime and a normal startup instead of the copying ROM process, and it must be because the card is used. It must already have had the bios on it. Hence, no copying process. Also, it was interesting that the Apple DVD Player had a conflict with the DigiDesign output drivers. I was lucky to find that only because it was near the top of the list. Please feel free to truncate or edit my e-mails if it might help someone else. Again, thank you so much for your help.

Greg in Brno

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Hi Greg;

Glad you found the problem. With MacOS Classic, trashing the Preferences (often works for misbehaving applications too) is always something to try when other nostrums fail.

As for your issues with installing Panther from burned DVDs, I'm not surprised, although I have no idea what the particular hangup might be. I've never been able to get even supported Jaguar to install on our WallStreet, although in that instance I suspect that it's and issue with the scrounged PC 100 RAM installed in it. The installation initiates and then hangs. OS 9.2.2 works so well on that machine, I haven't had a great deal of incentive to persevere with trying to get X to work on it. Interestingly, I had installed two distros of Linux on it in the past with no problem.

The DVD drive youre using may also be the sticking point. DVDs can be persnickity about drives. Your best bet would probably be to get a set of proper Panther Install CDs.

Still usng Panther on my Pismo, and it works so well that I'm reluctant to upgrade it (again) to Tiger, although it would be great to have Spotlight. Other than that, Panther is fine.

Charles

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Re: USB 2.0 card and WallStreet

From David Lye

Ref Your Very Informative Road Warrior Column

I picked up a Sabrent card at Tiger Direct, $22, and it works fine on my Wallstreet, at low speed with OS 9, which is fine for me.

David Lye

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Hi David;

Thanks for the report and tip. That's a great price on that Sabrent card!

Charles

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From The Road Warrior Archive The Road Warrior - Repartitioning My iBook's Hard Drive With Drive Genius

Another selection from The Road Warrior Archive, this article was first published on June 7, 2005, at which time I was preparing to install OS X 10.4 Tiger on my 700 MHz G3 iBook, and wanted a larger capacity hard drive partition than I had been using with OS 10.3. ProSoft's excellent disk management utility Drive Genius facilitated this without the necessity of wiping the drive and reinitializing with resized partitions from scratch.

Just to update, I did install Tiger on the CD-ROM only iBook via Target Disk Mode from my Pismo PowerBook, and the repartitioning has not caused any difficulties over the nineteen or so months since then. The iBook is happily running OS 10.4.8, although even the upsized partition is getting packed out. Twenty gigabyte drives are really not adequate anymore, but that's another topic. Anyway, if you have a drie that you would like to partition or resize existing partitions on without reinitialization, Drive Genius can do the job handily. Here's how I did it back in 2005.

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The Road Warrior

Repartitioning My iBook’s Hard Drive With Drive Genius

Breathing space for Tiger

The problem? When I originally partitioned my iBook’s 20 gigabyte hard drive back in January, 2003, 11 gigabytes seemed like a more than ample partition allotment for OS X 10.2 Jaguar, which officially required only 1.5 gigabytes of disk space. That minimum was as ridiculous as the fiction that you could successfully run OS X with 128 megabytes of RAM, but I figured I would likely not grow out of 11 gigabytes.

I was mistaken. I have a lot of applications and documents, and OS X itself has gradually grown. For the past six months, I’ve found it a challenge to keep three megabytes of free space open on the OS X partition, which I’ve determined is the minimum amount you want to have in order to keep Panther breathing freely. And OS X 10.4 Tiger is even bigger than Panther.

http://www.macopinion.com/columns/roadwarrior/05/06/07/index.html

The proper thing to do, if I had the time, would be to back up the drive contents, erase, initialize and partition it, and then restore everything after installing a spanking new copy of Tiger. However, my spare time is at a premium, and I really don’t want to have to do all that. The alternative workaround is to use a repartitioning software utility to adjust the partition map of on my hard drive.

There are several applications available that can do this job, and two that I had on hand were SubRosaSoft’s VolumeWorks, and Prosoft’s Drive Genius -- a multifunction disk tools utility whose Repartition module is based on VolumeWorks. I opted for Drive Genius 1.1, which is the newest iteration I had available.

ProSoft Engineering’s Drive Genius software is a suite of disk maintenance, repair, management, and optimization tools designed from the ground up specifically for Mac OS X. Drive Genius optimizes drive performance, protects data, can defragment a volume, analyze a volume and repair it if necessary, and includes media surface scanning and long term data integrity checking.

Prosoft sensibly recommends backing up your data before using many of the features in Drive Genius and regularly; that way, if anything goes wrong (virus, power blackout, OS error or hardware failure etc., you will be able to recover your data.

For my full review of Drive Genius, visit here.

For my review of VolumeWorks, visit here.

On with the repartitioning project.

My blissfully silent IBM 20 gigabyte IBM hard drive was divided into virtual volumes of 11, 3, and 5 gigabytes respectively, with another 900k or so occupied by the drive formatting. The bottom 5 MB partition is pretty full of our archived stuff, OS 9.2.2 for Classic Mode and emergency booting, and so forth, but I figured I could shrink the middle partition down to one gigabyte and thus give myself a couple of gigs more breathing space on the OS X volume.

The first step was to defragment the 3 GB partition so that its contents would be all the tidily clumped together.

Once the volume integrity is successfully verified, the defrag process begins.

The screen shows the fragmentation of the volume:

• The yellow portion represents the data has already been defragmented.

• The lavender portion represents file that hasn’t been moved yet.

• The black portion represents the free space.

Drive Genius gives you a running readout of what is happening as the defragmentation proceeds. It is not a quick process. In this case it took about half an hour.

For repartitioning. there are four key areas in the main window:

Partition List - the list on the left hand side of the screen shows all the partitions on the currently selected hard drive. The partition list will also show hidden partitions and partitions with file systems not supported by the OS.

Drive Name and Icon - the upper right hand corner indicates the name of the drive, the drive’s icon and the total size of the drive.

Context-sensitive help - provides help and descriptions of the current active screen and the icon buttons.

Once you select the volume or partition to work on, you can select the task you want to perform by clicking on one of the icon buttons on the toolbar at the bottom of the window. For operations such as adding, resizing, and shifting partitions, you will need to enter additional information pertain to the operation. Click the Reset, Delete, Hide, and Resize to select the appropriate function.

For example, to resize a partition, which is what I wanted to do this time, you click the Resize button and use the slider in the dialog that appears to select the desired new size of your partition and press Start to continue. You can also type in the new size of the partition.

To expand a volume, select the hard drive you want to work on, click on the Resize icon button, and use the slider to select the new size of your partition and click Start to continue. You need to have free space below the volume you want to expand. You can’t expand a volume if there is no free space adjacent to it. If the free space partition is on top of the volume you want to expand, you will need to use the Shift function to move the volume up before expanding the volume.

With the partition defragged, I was able to use Drive Genius’s resize function to shrink the middle volume down to one gigabyte, which left a new free space of two gigabytes. However, the opened up space was positioned beneath the newly resized partition, and I wanted to expand the topmost partition.

Drive Genius’s “Shift” function facilitates moving partitions in relation to one another, and I used it to move the free space on top of the shrunken one gigabyte partition.

Finally, I used the Resize dialog slider to expand the top partition into the newly opened up free space below it, thus enlarging it to 13 GB, which hopefully will compensate for the extra bulk of Tiger and a bit more besides.

The entire operation went smoothly, and I encountered no problems. You have to boot from a different volume in order to do the sort of tasks with either Drive Genius or VolumeWorks. Both applications come on bootable CDs, but I detest setting up from CDs, and instead installed Drive Genius on my external FireWire hard drive, which has a bootable OS 10.3.4 system on it, and booted from that. It worked perfectly.

Since I had moved all of the files on two partitions, I decided it would be wise to run Disk Warrior and check for directory damage. Sure enough, Disk Warrior found some problems on the OS X partition, but they were easily repaired. As a bonus, I noticed that Panther seems to start up much more quickly than I had been accustomed to.

One final note; Repartition is designed to work with OS X partitions. Using it on OS 9 volume may remove the ability to start up OS 9 from that partition, assumedly because the OS 9 disk drivers may be eliminated in the process. It does not affect the data on OS 9 volumes. I can, however, still boot from the OS 9 System Folder on my third partition.

Mission accomplished, Now to install Tiger. But that’s another movie.

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cmoore@macopinion.com

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