Brian SwetlandI did manage to use the BeBox to pull an image of the 170MB HDD in the BeMachine... it made some pretty awful noises and the first attempt failed to read the first 64K or so, but the second attempt succeeded. Sadly, the contents were nearly identical to the Hobbit-93080009.img available online. No amazing new artifacts.
Managed to capture some video of the BeMachine running the Hobbit-93080009.img available online. It's weird looking at this proto-BeOS, predating the PPC BeBox, and a lot of evolution of the system. Still many familiar icons and interfaces...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kU0MS7o-rg
I'm still working on how to best capture video. This is VGA from the machine to VGA->HDMI adapter to an HDMI capture interface to OBS, cropping and scaling to get close to the 4:3 source image.
BeMachine running Hobbit-93080009.img
Well, the bad news is the old 170MB drive looks like it might be toast. The good news is the BeMachine still powers up okay and thanks to HDD images online, I was able to get it booting using a BlueSCSIv2 SCSI sdcard interface. Now I need to scare up an AT keyboard and PS2 (or maybe serial? I remember using a serial mouse with this thing, no idea if PS2 works) mouse.
So this is one of the motivations for imaging and emulating one of those ancient SCSI drives. I don't think I've booted this thing since I left Be in 2000 and am very curious if it still works.
Here's hoping these spin up and are readable. So far I've had zero luck getting an old BusLogic PCI SCSI controller working in a modern Linux box, so next step is try a ZuluSCSI sdcard emulator in Initiator Mode. Want to image these before trying to boot the machines they belong to.