I will add, though, that the old bug-a-boo of finding or extracting a usable Classic OS ROM is no longer an issue.
I'm not going to take you through the whole process for Setting up SheepShaver for Mac OS X here, as the current E-Maculation page provides excellent online instructions.
Of course, the recovery came just after I'd taken delivery of the new laptop, which by the way, is a delight to use. Unlike the G5, it did recover and still works. Yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that in the middle of everything above, my G4 Slab-O-Mac lost its ability to take a charge. I first installed Sheepshaver with Classic 9.0 on my new 13" MacBook Pro.
Maybe I was just doing something wrong when I first tried Sheepshaver in 2008, or maybe I didn't have the right Classic OS install disks, but this time around, the installation went flawlessly.twice. I began to look once more at Sheepshaver for my Classic Mac OS needs. (During the motherboard failure process, which took several days, an older version of DiskWarrior had indeed brought one of the drives back to life.)īesides switching back to my original backup G5, I had to scramble back to an old external hard drive and my G4 QuickSilver for backups to restore the G5, as my main, brand new, terribly expensive, G-RAID 2 TBĮxternal backup drive failed after just four months of use! While I was able to restore most of what was lost from the failed drives, losing two G5s inside of six months had me a bit snakebit about relying on seven year old computers for running Classic apps.
The G5 is awaiting installation of another motherboard I picked up on eBay, but nothing, not even the latest version of DiskWarrior, could resurrect the failed drives. And then the newer G5 not only cooked its motherboard, but took out both of the 500 gig drives in it. So I put off installing Sheepshaver on the Mini, relying instead on the G5's Classic mode under Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) for running Claris Home Page the few times I needed it. I managed to get it up and running, but never could get a good install of System 8.1 that I wanted, and abandoned the effort in frustration. When I'd first installed Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on the G5, I experimented briefly with the Sheepshaver emulator.
Parallels 7 handled installations of Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux without a hiccup, leaving only an installation of the Mac Classic emulator, Sheepshaver, to have the Mini able to handle all my computing needs.
I also installed Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) on a separate partition of the hard drive. I cloned the G5's Leopard drive to an external drive, cleaned it up there, and then cloned that to the Mini's drive before upgrading it to Snow Leopard. The transition to a mid-2010 Mac Mini really went rather well. I'd first switched to a backup G5 that I'd used on my last job site, but eventually bought a slightly faster G5 tower for just a few bucks more than a replacement motherboard would have cost for the failed unit. I began what has turned out to be a rather long and somewhat troubled transition to modern Macs in February after my venerable G5 tower cooked its motherboard last December.