anyone familiar with MAC?

I have an older powermac, and it has a 4 gig IDE HD. My current system also uses IDE.I only gave $20 for the mac, and I am curious.

Can I reformat that Mac drive, and install KNOPPIX to it, and have it work on my Windows PC? (yes, I'd take my HP's HD out, take the performa's HD out, and swap them.....reformatting the mac HD is the issue....will it work?)

Thanks in advance 8)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by fourtrackmind

I have an older powermac, and it has a 4 gig IDE HD. My current system also uses IDE.I only gave $20 for the mac, and I am curious.

Can I reformat that Mac drive, and install KNOPPIX to it, and have it work on my Windows PC? (yes, I'd take my HP's HD out, take the performa's HD out, and swap them.....reformatting the mac HD is the issue....will it work?)

Thanks in advance 8)

---

Knoppix is not going to install on that it is for a x86 family of processors Mac's use different ones. Depending on the processor involved I believe that you still need the Mac OS installed to be able to boot the Linux install. I would say Google is your friend here with the keywords mac install linux.

Stephen,

Thanks for your reply.

I think you misunderstood. I want to take the harddisk out of the mac, and format it on my windows machine. I will do the formatting here, if the physical circuitboards match up. Or is the hard disk, although IDE, different from a windows-compatible HD?

Might reformatting a mac HD on a windows machine work? I mean the physical hardware. perhaps this is the wrong place to post. :cry:

Sorry for any confusion.

Also, what is the final size of the KNOPPIX install? I realize it's compressed to beat all heck, so how much space do I need for the OS and packages?

Ah I see I misread the question , if it is a standard IDE drive then you can do anything you want if there is some kind of proprietary circuits on the controller then no you would not be able to use it. I think the Apple site could answer that question they should still have the specs of the machine laying around on a page somewhere. Now just to be sure here your goal is to use this drive in the x86 machine with knoppix installed on it not in a mac right. The final install size is 2.2GB so if the drive works in an x86 machine then you have more than enough room.

Quote:

---

4 gig IDE HD

---

Non-scsi mac's such as performa's etc. use standard IDE drives, I just recently put a 30GB maxtor hd in an old performa for a friend whose son uses the mac for school stuff. So the 4GB IDE drive would work in a pc for a knoppix drive.

~rock

ya that'll work. I've used mac Hard drives in PC's and PC HDD's in Mac's for a while without problems.