Boot an old drive

Anything about Mac emulation that does not belong in the above categories.

Moderators: Cat_7, Ronald P. Regensburg

Post Reply
Shekenz
Space Cadet
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2020 7:22 pm

Boot an old drive

Post by Shekenz »

Hi everyone !

I just registered because I'm having an issue that I thaught I was the only guy on earth being confronted to it. And then I found this forum. So I'm giving a try with that community, maybe at least I could get in the right direction. Here is the story :

Four of years ago I tried to restore an old MacPro G5 that a friend used as a stool. Model from June 2003 if I'm remembering correctly. I successfully installed the last Leopard compatible with PPC, maxed-up the ram to 8Gb, and put an ssd and a 4To hard drive in the beast. Then the old Leopard being limited latelly, I installed the last Debian PPC compatible (Debian 6 I think), and I used the ol'comp as a headless server, taking care of my torrents and sharing my audio library like a charm for 2 years. I was running an apache and mysql servers too. Hélas, the poor old bastard didn't survived my last moving out. I never could start it again after that ;(

Anyway, I'm digging an old project and turns out I need to get old mysql databases that I never backed up that are still in the system. The boot drive has an Apple partition scheme, with a 64bit Debian ppc installed. I tried at first with VirtualBox without hope...

I'd really want to boot that old Debian install in a virtual machine. Is that even possible ? Could an emulator help in that task ? I'm totally new in this world.

Thanks in advance
User avatar
adespoton
Forum All-Star
Posts: 4208
Joined: Fri Nov 27, 2009 5:11 am
Location: Emaculation.com
Contact:

Re: Boot an old drive

Post by adespoton »

If you have another computer with a Firewire port, you can use a cable to connect the two, boot the G5 with T held down, and boot it in target disk mode. It'll then show up as a removeable drive on the other machine, where you can then use dd or Disk Utility to image the drive.

If this isn't an option, toss the SSD in an enclosure, attach it to another computer, and image the disk. Or just plug the SSD in internally and do the same thing.

Once you have a DMG, you can convert it to VDI format to use with VirtualBox. I usually use qemu-img to do the conversion on the command line, as it works better than most of the other tools I've tried.

A few things to note though: Virtual Machines only virtualize the hardware environment; they use the same instruction sets. So no, you can't boot a PPC OS on VirtualBox, because VirtualBox is x86-64 only. You might be able to boot it on QEMU-System-PPC, except that's 32-bit, not 64-bit. AFAIK, there isn't currently a virtualization or emulation environment for 64-bit PPC.

That said, most stuff in Debian 6 PPC should be drop-in replaceable by Debian 6 Intel, which IS runnable in VirtualBox. You'll need a new filesystem, new kernel, and new binaries, but all the configuration files and userland should be pretty much the same.
Shekenz
Space Cadet
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2020 7:22 pm

Re: Boot an old drive

Post by Shekenz »

Thanks a lot. Those informations were very helpful.

I forgot about emulating anything right away, and i couldn't boot in target disk anyway. But your idea of making a disk image got me on the right track. I put the drive in en enclosure and started Linux virtual machine. I was looking around how to make an image of it and I found out a way to access the data directly with testdisk, a tool to restore erased data.

I was then able to retrieve my databases in not time. Thanks for the push !

Cheers !
Post Reply