i have had a quick search, so i hope i am not mulling over old topics,.....

I want to basically clone my ibook hard disk to run with pearPC, maybe in the future... has anyone tried this....can it work?

Wow... that's a new one.

Um, I assume you would need a program that can create an .img file from an existing hard drive. I have no knowledge of programs that can do this on the PC or Mac, though.

Good question!

I haven't tried it, but I think that it would work. The only thing is that you would probably have to clone the image from a G3 system, and you might have to set the RAM size to be the same as the original system. Other than that, I fail to see why it wouldn't work.

Try it, and let us know the results! :)

The only thing I can think it would have a problem with is the change in hardware, but maybe that can be fixed.

_________________
Once you've made something idiot proof, they go and invent a better idiot!

I somewhere read that it works. Get yourself Carbon copy cloner and clone your boot drive.

Please report back here.

Sounds like a cool idea though!

_________________
Once you've made something idiot proof, they go and invent a better idiot!

*bump*

Recent speculation concerning the lack of PowerPC emulation in Mac OS X 10.7 has me seriously interested in the topic. Planning ahead, an attractive option would be to clone one of my "retired" hard drives to an image file and run it as a VM under PearPC. One particularly good candidate comes from a Ti PB with 10.4.11 installed.

Has anyone done this successfully? If so, are there any pitfalls I should be aware of?

I probably won't get around to trying until later this year, but this seems like a good place to start researching it.

Hi,

I guess this would be possible. Even if you couldn't boot the image directly, you might still be able to copy it's content to a disk attached to pearpc. Some problems might arise with respect to CPU emulation: PearPC never reliably emulated a G4 processor, only the G3 is supported. So, there is no Altivec support. Some of your programs might not like that.
Another issue is the fact that (for OSX) PearPC doesn't allow using the Just-In-Time compiler, which will make emulation dead slow.

All-in-all I would say you have a chance to run the disk image, but it will not be workable.

Best,
Cat_7

I have a friend in the same boat (eventually) since he has an old g3 powerbook which has programs he'll want to run on his newer MacBook.

Have you tried Disk Utility? You can image any volume, and it should only use as much space as was used on the original drive. You can also try using dd or hdiutil (command-line apps), but I'd highly suggest trying Disk Utility first.

I have done exactly what ball is suggesting.
Created DiskCopy6 images (read/write) on my iMac G3.
Mounted the images with SheepShaver.
No problem.
Of course I did not boot SS with that images, so this is not what the OP was asking for.