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Jerry asked: > One of the ladies in the office has an old Mac G3 Macbook ... I was > just wondering if there are any OpenSource or freeware standalone > wipe CDs et. al. A corollary of this question is: if you have an old Mac, how can you get the data off it if the machine is kaput? My partner has one in the basement and when I plugged it in recently (motivated by all the hoopla about Jobs), the monitor would not come on. (It's got a funky connector so ... no other compatible monitors in the house.) This was a Quadra vintage 1994 and what I discovered is that its construction is the exact opposite of modern Apple gear. Expecting to find a hermetically sealed enclosure (you know the type--can't even change a battery in these new things), what I found was a series of quick-release plastic snaps to hold everything together, from the RAM chips to the hard drive to the outer shell. The hard drive is a standard 50-pin SCSI. The filesystem is hfs. Assuming you have a SCSI adapter lying around, those things Just Plain Work on Linux so after I dd'ed the entire hard drive (160Mb doesn't take long!) I had the whole project complete in a matter of 15 minutes or so. (The files were mostly created in an antique Mac version of MS Office so they have to be read by Word/PowerPoint '97... I couldn't extract them with open-source office software, alas.) So, Jerry, pop open the hood and dban the drive on a Linux box. ;-) -rich
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