Of all the donations I have been the appreciative recipient of at my store over the years, this takes the cake… Someone dropped off a PowerBook 150 and the oh-so-chunky “Apple Low-Power AC Adapter” yesterday. It is not booting, and a quick internal inspection does reveal evidence of both battery and capacitor leakage, so I may have a bit of a project ahead of me rubs hands together with glee…

The one request the lady who donated had was for me to erase any and all data on the hard drive - I did offer to attempt to recover it. To be able to see if the 2.5-inch SCSI hard drive is even functioning, I have ordered from Aberco on eBay an adapter from the SCSI connector variant these old 2.5-inch drives use to the more common 50 pin connector on 3.5-inch drives (I did have one of those adapters a long time ago). So, once that arrives I will see if the drive works and run through a secure erase or three…

Update: Noticed this morning when looking at the entry in Mactracker that the PowerBook 150 actually uses IDE for the internal hard drive! So, pulled the drive, connected it up via a IDE/USB bridge, and… it spins, but not detected. May be worth trying in in an older machine as the adapter may be “too new” for it to work.

Update 2: I connected to an internal IDE connector in my Power Macintosh G3 tower, wouldn’t mount, Drive Setup said it couldn’t initialise it, but DiskWarrior v2 rebuilt the directory successfully and it mounted! All empty, but ran through a secure erase anyway. 120MB capacity, back then that seemed like so much :)

Currently listening - [AllttA (Featuring a AI-generated version of Jay-Z) - “Savages”] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7r6PAkFRfU)