The G5 is awaiting installation of another motherboard I picked up on eBay, but nothing, not even the latest version of DiskWarrior, could resurrect the failed drives. And then the newer G5 not only cooked its motherboard, but took out both of the 500 gig drives in it. So I put off installing Sheepshaver on the Mini, relying instead on the G5's Classic mode under Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) for running Claris Home Page the few times I needed it. I managed to get it up and running, but never could get a good install of System 8.1 that I wanted, and abandoned the effort in frustration. When I'd first installed Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on the G5, I experimented briefly with the Sheepshaver emulator. Parallels 7 handled installations of Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux without a hiccup, leaving only an installation of the Mac Classic emulator, Sheepshaver, to have the Mini able to handle all my computing needs. I also installed Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) on a separate partition of the hard drive. I cloned the G5's Leopard drive to an external drive, cleaned it up there, and then cloned that to the Mini's drive before upgrading it to Snow Leopard.

The transition to a mid-2010 Mac Mini really went rather well.

I'd first switched to a backup G5 that I'd used on my last job site, but eventually bought a slightly faster G5 tower for just a few bucks more than a replacement motherboard would have cost for the failed unit. I began what has turned out to be a rather long and somewhat troubled transition to modern Macs in February after my venerable G5 tower cooked its motherboard last December.

Mac classic os emulator