After months of lurking eBay, I found this PowerBook 170 last week.

Adorable.

While it powered up for the seller, it won’t boot for me.

I’m guessing we have a stale PRAM battery that died in the cold weather of transit.

PRAM battery was just fine, even 30 years in.

Turns out the problem was a sour AC adapter. The PowerBook only wants 7.5 volts, so my universal adapter could take over duties.

Tomorrow I’ll get the 6116 online to make some System 7 restore disks.

Guess I’m troubleshooting two Macs tonight

Performa’s HD partitions are fucked. I wonder if it’s cells dying off in the cheap SD card I used to replace the drive, or some other shenanigans

But the Performa restore CD booted fine, and it has a bootable disk tools image sized for floppies, so we’re off.

But this isn’t great news.

HD SC setup can’t see the internal drive at all. Yet it spins and whirs at startup.

Hardware failure seems a likely culprit, but I wish I had more thorough bus probing tools before I go to replace it.

PowerBooks have weird SCSI shit going on inside

Casing where the drive anchors is actually broken.

Any trauma that can wrench it out like that could surely break the sensitive drive as well. You hate to see it—the 170 retailed for $4800 in its day.

Sticker residue on the back makes me think it was corporate owned, but still

For the sake of thoroughness, I reseated the SCSI cable on both ends.

But it was a long shot. Still no love.

But look at that gorgeous monochrome display.

It looks like the solution is a special version of SCSI2SD designed for PowerBooks!

https://store.inertialcomputing.com/product-p/scsi2sd-v5-2.5-inch.htm

I'll update you when that arrives.

A handy thing about that is: I can install System 7.5 onto the SD card in the 6116, via the restore CD, and then transplant that into the PowerBook, saving me the trouble of imaging five installation floppies or whatever

My SCSI2SD should arrive tomorrow. Meanwhile, getting the other Macs tuned up so I have a good starting point to fix the PowerBook.

Working on old Macs is oddly therapeutic. The problem space is nicely constrained. All the issues I might come across are already well understood by ancient, childhood firmware.

And I just love the aesthetics. It’s all so innocent.

The adventure continues. The SCSI2SD, in PowerBook flavor, arrived yesterday.

On the left is the original drive. You can see they share similar dimensions, but also, critically, the same teensy SCSI pin pitch.

I’ve got the System 7.5 installer copied over onto the drive, but it’s not a working boot disk yet.

I’ve gone soft in my old age and missed a magnetic tool near the bootable floppy I set up. So it’s time for a fresh one

Now we see if the PowerBook wants to live again.

We are booted to the desktop. Boot floppy worked and there’s the new SCSI2SD drive

When I got in there, one of the pins was blocked—for orientation reasons. But the SCSI2SD’s pins didn’t have a corresponding gap

Not wanting to damage the new drive, I heated up my soldering iron

I used the tip to melt a gap back into the internal SCSI cable.

First time around it wouldn’t boot—wrong orientation.

But after flipping it around, all’s well. Somehow this worked out

Let’s see if installation works.

It’s… not so much happening as about to happen.

I wonder what this stage was for. Disk checking?

Very potent nostalgia, seeing the System 7-era installer

We are away.

Still working to get the 6116 back in shape meanwhile.

I forgot how ugly the Performa software restore app was.