Mastodawn

Now that the dishes have been washed after our "brunch," I decided to hook up this HP CD-Writer Plus to the SiniStarMax and see if it would work. After some fumbling around with the jumper on the HP device, the StarMax finally booted up when the jumper was placed in "MAS" ("master," or preferably "primary" today). Apple System Profiler detected it as a LG CED-8083B CD-RW drive and a burned disc successfully mounted and opened in Mac OS 8.6. I should test and see if it loads in BeOS as well. Once I find an IDE cable with an extra connection, I'll connect both optical drives to the logic board which will be cool for creating CD images and burning them. #MARCHintosh

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ClaudioM 22h ago

Yep! Works fine in BeOS as well. While it didn't recognize the Mac OS 9.1 disc, it did recognize the BeOS 5 Pro Edition disc I burned awhile ago.

I'll have to test the burning capabilities in both operating systems. There is a CD burning app in BeOS, but I have to see if the Apple Disk Utility app in Mac OS will burn a disc with this CD-RW drive. #MARCHintosh

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ClaudioM 21h ago

With a lot of care, I managed to remove the front bezel of the SiniStarMax in order to get the HP CD-Writer Plus on a drive bay underneath the Apple 24X CD-ROM drive. And that pile of dust bunnies was inside the grill where the front fan is.

#MARCHintosh

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ClaudioM 21h ago

Everything's looking good in spite of the color difference. Now, to connect the cables and power her back on. The top optical drive will remain disconnected until I can get an IDE cable that will connect both of them. #MARCHintosh

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ClaudioM 18h ago

OK, so the next thing I tried on the StarMax was to see if this old Iomega Jaz drive of mine still worked. I had backed up files a LONG time ago to one of these Jaz drives and was hoping to load it and back everything up to my FreeBSD Netatalk share. After downloading the IomegaWare software, I was able to successfully mount the Jaz drive and move all of its contents over to the Netatalk share. I even found a backup of my old family blog from the early aughts!

BTW, the screenshots were taken natively in Mac OS, but I used ffmpeg to convert the PICT files to .JPG since I didn't have ImageMagick installed, but it worked as you can see.