[Discuss] Discuss Digest, Vol 6, Issue 3

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Jerry asked:
> One of the ladies in the office has an old Mac G3 Macbook ... I was
> just wondering if there are any OpenSource or freeware standalone
> wipe CDs et. al.

A corollary of this question is:  if you have an old Mac, how can you get the
data off it if the machine is kaput?  My partner has one in the basement and
when I plugged it in recently (motivated by all the hoopla about Jobs), the
monitor would not come on.  (It's got a funky connector so ... no other
compatible monitors in the house.)

This was a Quadra vintage 1994 and what I discovered is that its construction
is the exact opposite of modern Apple gear.  Expecting to find a hermetically
sealed enclosure (you know the type--can't even change a battery in these new
things), what I found was a series of quick-release plastic snaps to hold
everything together, from the RAM chips to the hard drive to the outer shell.

The hard drive is a standard 50-pin SCSI.  The filesystem is hfs.  Assuming
you have a SCSI adapter lying around, those things Just Plain Work on Linux so
after I dd'ed the entire hard drive (160Mb doesn't take long!) I had the whole
project complete in a matter of 15 minutes or so.  (The files were mostly
created in an antique Mac version of MS Office so they have to be read by
Word/PowerPoint '97... I couldn't extract them with open-source office
software, alas.)

So, Jerry, pop open the hood and dban the drive on a Linux box. ;-)

-rich