Recently rummaging thru the basement I came across two fine old PowerBook G3s and accessories. One I’ve identified as a Lombard variant and it brings back many interesting memories. Wanting to explore it, I plugged it in and booted and up came the login screen with Mac OS X and a ‘shiny’ gray Apple with a stroke across the left side, but my memory is blank what it could be. Tried two possible ones but no-go.
Online research says booting using original system discs will allow changing the password with a startup utility (post didn’t say if the old password is still needed for that procedure).
Looked high and low a couple of hours over several days for the system discs but cannot find them. (preparing for storage/move 9 years ago, I donated a lot of discs to the computer history museum in the Bay Area, maybe these also by mistake, or stored them in such an obvious way that I would not be able to overlook them ).
Macintosh Garden and Macintosh Repository and Archive.org Vintage software sites have what appears to be almost right files but the sources are sometimes not clear. They claim to be faithful .img or .iso or .toast files of the original discs but I thought I’d ask here first if anyone can vouch for those sources or suggest reliable ones. Couldn’t find them on Apple’s site.
In order to simply look at the contents, I tried Target Disk Mode, booting from original plug-in CD/DVD drive and external dvd with later discs, and with a bootable USB stick of an older OS but nothing worked. The drives would spin up and run a few seconds, spin down, over and over. So, kind of stumped for now.
The link you kindly sent is the Apple page I was referring to in the OP, the login screen simply shows “Mac OS X” but is surely older than 10.7 Lion. As I can’t get past this screen I am not sure which version it’s on now. The Specs page for the Mac shows it would have shipped with 8.6 and can run 9 and X.
Might be I’m using wrong keywords in searching Apple’s site.
According to MacTracker, the latest macOS you can boot on a Lombard (bronze keyboard) PowerBook G3 is 10.3.9 (“Panther”). This dates back to a point before macOS was a free download. It shipped on DVD and was not available in any other format.
The hard drive will definitely be formatted HFS+, so in the absolute worst case, you should be able to remove the drive (easier said than done) and connect it to a modern Mac via a USB adapter. The drive uses a parallel ATA interface.
But it also means you should be able to boot any version of macOS (from 8.6 through 10.3) from a CD/DVD and access the file system from there. But that assumes you already have such a disc.
FileVault was introduced in Mac OS X 10.3, so if you were using it, you might not be able to access your files without a password. At that time, it only encrypted home directories, but that’s probably where you were storing your documents.
Good luck.
Update: Another option. Can you hold down Option while booting? This should let you select different operating systems. If you have macOS 9 installed, you can select that, which might get you around the login screen.
Thanks a bunch @Shamino , for the wealth of details. I forgot to check MacTracker.
I looked on iFixit about removing the HD and it’s not ‘super simple’ but doable like you say worst case, but it would be cool to have the machine running again and see what’s on there and use it from time to time for fun and nostalgia, after having copied any useful documents/photos etc from it. I have a G4 iMac on my desk that I fire up for iTunes now and then.
There are some original disc images out there but possibly dodgy sources, possibly perfectly fine, I don’t have the experience to know. I seem to have lost track of the original discs so downloading and burning one on a fresh disk seems best option. I do have a G4 MBPro that won’t boot, it might have an old 1Password on it with the G3’s user account pw.
I did try holding Option during boot with a bootable usb stick with maybe Lion on it and there was just a spinner for a good minute or so and I released Option and it booted again to the login window. I would have bought it new with 8.6 on it and upgraded over time. Not sure if upgrades would have knocked out OS 8&9 but I’ll try Option-boot and advise if it succeeds.
You should be able to find Panther disks on eBay without too much trouble. I’d say $10-30 would be reasonable. If you decide to go that route, buy the retail version of Panther, as opposed to a machine-specific version that may have shipped with a particular Mac.
Update: As my home data volume is limited I went to a cafe with fast internet and downloaded a couple of what appear to be the right discs from Garden and Repository. Still need to review how to burn to disc then try to boot the Lombard with them. Kind of a busy weekend ahead so might take til next week for my next update.
Also rec’d very kind and generous support thru PM from a couple of TBTers, which I hadn’t anticipated and am very grateful for.
But really, duh @TBTdn ! I ask for trustworthy sources and of course TBTers spring to the rescue, how could I have not known!
I’ve found Macintosh Garden and Macintosh Repository reliable (and useful!). In terms of the Internet Archive that can be useful too though a bit difficult to decide which of several options to download. Something that can be helpful in this regard is looking at the disc images that Infinite Mac uses. If you go to their Github listing the System Software CD-ROMs they use, page you can click on the relevant system version json to see the URL of the image they use.
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