adespoton wrote:
I got rid of mine just as the DVD-ROM drive started to fail.
LOL, same problem with this one, DVD-ROM failed... but it's OK, CD/DVD is so outdated IMO. Just like the original iMac put an end to floppy disks for Apple, the airBook put an end to CD/DVD some years back. IMO it's a sh*t technology that only was useful for a handful of years, that's all. It was useful for an even less amount of years than the floppy disks were! I'd call it some kind of "transition tech" CD->DVD->BLUERAY... Magnetic sucked in transfer speeds, was bulky and fragile, but was very afordable, then optic was affordable and offered huge storage capacity back in the days... but to tell the truth solid state was there the whole time... but it was costly and it did not offer good enough capacity for the volume of space it required, but hell it was FAST AND DURABLE... not something magnetic nor optic could ever offer IMO even tough they were cheap technology. Nowadays, SSD is coming back in force and soon mecanical hard drives will be suppressed from the surface of the earth AT LAST! No more stupid scratched disk or de-magnetized floppy nor broken hard drive motor or head crash or bad sectors... *UGH!*
adespoton wrote:
If you have IEEE1394 in your current computer, you can set the iMac into target disk mode, and mount it remotely on another device over a Firewire link. Otherwise, a direct ethernet connection is a good idea for data transfers.
Unfortunately, I do not have another Mac, only vmware with OSX 10.10 in it, but I doubt this could be an option. You're right about ethernet or WiFi transfers, it would be really fast, but this does not solve the issue concerning the new hard drive preparation. I still have to HFS+ format it and install Mac OS 9 on it to be able to put it back in the iMac DV+ and boot it up. From there, yes, I could share a network drive and send stuff like this overnight or something. But the thing is: If somebody could explain to me how to format a USB drive in SheepShaver, I could do the WHOLE THING (format, install OS 9, copy 50GB of files) in a single operation and let it copy for an hour and I would done with the whole thing at once.
adespoton wrote:
If you can find an old USB+Firewire enclosure, that would be a good way to transfer data; plug in as USB on your current computer to load the data, and plug in as Firewire on the iMac, which can boot from an external Firewire device, just not USB.
From what I saw online, those are ridiculously expensive. I even thought about purchasing a USB to Firewire converter and use a 500GB USB external drive to do this, but I gave up, I found that even that was costly.
adespoton wrote:
What OS is the beast running? Mine topped out with OS X 10.2 and Mac OS 9.2.2 I believe.
It was running Mac OS 9.0 on its 20GB internal hard drive and I successfully upgraded it to 9.2.2 universal by .sit the .iso and copying it using an USB stick then mounting it in the Finder and installing on place. The universal 9.2.2 installer quits the Finder and overwrites the System Folder automatically, pretty neat. With the latest sprockets, OpenGL, etc automatically installed too

I'm NOT installing OSX at all on this iMac DV+. All I want is to install 9.2.2 on a brand new SSD drive that is coming in 2 weeks. I'm a retro Mac OS 9 fan, not a retro OSX fan. The only OSX version I'm MAYBE willing to peek at some day is OSX DP2, which is the only OSX version that actually had remains of the Platinum interface, I just want to try it for a couple hours, but I'll not be sticking with it for obvious reasons.
SO... all that said, let's focus on the issue: How to mount a USB stick or drive in SheepShaver to be able to format it. I'll tell you what also: When I plug in a FAT32 USB stick in the iMac DV+ it can format it, but NOT initialize it, so I cannot change the partition table and make it HFS, it can only be formated as FAT32 again on the iMac DV+ which really sucks. The point is to be able to copy files directly on it to make this faster, because FAT32 is PC so ANY file I put on the USB stick at the moment has to be .sit beforehand, really a pain to transfer thousands of files.
--- EDIT: I just had a crazy idea. If I unplugged the DVD-ROM drive from the iMac DV+ and connected the SSD drive (with the PATA to SATA converter) in place of the DVD-ROM IDE cable, would the iMac boot up and see/use both hard drives? This would solve the other half of the issue and let me format it + install Mac OS 9 on it, right? I think if this worked tough, I'd be F***'ed to copy files by attaching it to my PC, because since it won't be possible to mount it then (because it will be formated as HFS+ at this point) I would then not be able to copy files to it I guess. But at least I can still do the files copying using a FAT32 USB stick. I could for instance have StuffIt produce a sh*tload of exactly 0.999GB file parts for a couple hours, then come back and copy all those part files to the FAT32 USB stick, then copy them on the iMac DV+ hard drive (SSD) and then extract them all (letting it sit there for hours doing this job lol)... it might not be too crazy, any better ideas anybody?
--- EDIT #2: I just had yet ANOTHER crazy idea. Since I will have a PATA to SATA converter handy in 2 weeks, I could also use a DVD-RAM drive from a PC and plug it in place of the defective DVD-ROM drive in the iMac DV+ no? Would that work or are there only a couple "Apple-approved" DVD drive brands and anything else won't work?