Old Macs Die Hard

My client’s Blue and White Macintosh G3 tower has been dying. You might say that its time is up and you might be right, it is almost seven years old now, more or less. Its original hard drive (I think) was coughing up a bloody digital lung, the first sign of its infirmity. Of course, the machine has been an important print production tool for my client and has been treated to a processor upgrade, its innards stuffed with as much RAM as it can handle (more, actually. It can only see 512 MB but it has another 128 MB stick in it for good measure), and a SCSI card. The one thing they didn’t count on was, well, it being a nearly seven year old Blue and White G3.

With a dead hard drive controller on the motherboard.

I was confounded for what, three days now? I simply thought that the hard drive was dying. “No problem, I’ll just install a new one!” After all, the utilities were saying things that happen to old hard drives; dropped links, bad sectors, dead blocks. The client ordered a new drive and I spent a full day (that’s like, you know, 24 hours) trying to reload the operating system with no success. How was I to know that the controller itself was bad?

You could’ve looked on the Innernut.

Oh yeah, that. The bad controller is well documented. If I had bothered to actually look before I leapt, I would have known that and informed my client that a new controller was needed. Another hundred bucks later and today everything seems to be in good shape. OS 9 and OS X installed without a hitch, and I’m even saving the old drive to use as a backup. The data looks to be in good shape, so maybe I can call this a win for the good guys (me) and a stunning defeat for the hard drive controller chip manufacturers (I suspect links to Al Qaeda).

Bastards.

Your best pal,

bob