Old Macs and USB support

By jeltsch on Tue, 03/17/2009 - 17:01

We have a few legacy Macintosh computers at work which are still running different flavours of MacOS 9. Although these machines have USB ports, they are mostly non-functional. I think MacOS 9.0 was the first version that supported USB mass storage devices, but apparently support has been shaky until and including version 9.2.2. Apparently the various updates to MacOS 9 mainly addressed the problems with USB (and firewire) support. At least for one of these machines (running MAcOS 9.2.2) I managed to fix the USB support. I removed all non-Apple USB- and firewire-related extensions from the system folder (e.g. some from Lacie). Then I downloaded the MacOS 9.1 upgrade from Apple and extracted all USB-related extensions using TomeViewer and replaced the existing (9.2.2) extensions by these (9.1) counterparts. After a reboot my (PC-formatted) USB stick was recognized immediately. Here is the list of extensions that I replaced:

  • HID Library
  • SerialShimLib
  • USB Device Extension
  • USB Mass Storage Support
  • USB Software Locator
  • USB Support