Loyal readers of my blog will remember that my Powerbook Wallstreet G3 died on September 21st, 2002. Since I’m probably the only one that remembers, I’ll point you to that blog entry. The good news was that the hard drive was intact, the bad news was that I didn’t have an easy way of accessing it. I have a Firewire enclosure, and my old Powerbook was running Linux, so I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to get my new Powerbook to read the data off the old HD. I mean Mac OS X and Linux are the same underneath, right? Well, not quite. Mac OS X uses a filesystem called HFS+ and my version of Linux uses a filesystem called ext2. Turns out that no one had written an ext2 driver for Mac OS X.

So, I turned to Google and with more effort than usual, found the Mac OS X Ext2 Filesystem Project, or ext2fsx. I subscribed to the RSS feed and just waited until I saw the 1.0.1 product released on 11/20/2003 (Never trust the 1.0!). I loaded it up and voila! My old Wallstreet was back. Thank you Brian Bergstrand!

In celebration, I’ve uploaded pictures from 2001 and early 2002 that I thought I had lost forever. Enjoy.