The Low End Mac Mailbag

Fixing Negative Feedback on eBay and Problems Booting a Blue & White G3 in OS X

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Dan Knight - 2007.06.08

Cleaning Up eBay Feedback

Ron Silva writes in response to eBay Feedback: Proceed with Caution:

Mr. Knight,

The information you posted incorrect. You can remove it if you follow the links below.

G'Luck,

Ron Silva - Long time eBay seller..

Ron,

Thanks for the info. I've never had to deal with abusive/retaliatory feedback myself. I'll forward these links to the two parties in hopes it may help them.

Dan

Mutually Withdraw eBay Feedback

Mike Richardson writes:

Hey Dan,

eBay users can use a feature called "Mutually Withdraw Feedback". Although the feedback text remains on the user's feedback page, it no longer counts against them anymore.

Thanks,
Mike Richardson

Mike,

Thanks for the info. I'll forward it.

Dan

Getting Around Negative eBay Feedback

Phil Alexander says:

What you can do in that case is have Used Macs quickly put up another auction (for $1) and have Dave buy it now.

Then they can feedback again, and use that to "Take back" the other feedback. True, the negative will stay, but Dave can reply to the negative telling people to "look further".

Yea, not perfect. But better than private! I hate private feedback!

Dealing with Online Scammers

Dennis Smith writes:

Hi Dan,

After three months of promises - "will ship tomorrow, have shipped" - false tracking numbers, and finally no response to emails, I left negative feedback describing the facts. He responded with negative feedback that included name calling. One email to eBay and they removed the feedback he left for me due to the name calling. This happened within two days. My negative feedback to him remains on his record. I finally got the item damaged and useless and eventually did get a full refund.

Another eBay seller tried to scam me for 'handling' charges beyond the stated charges on the eBay listing. Negative feedback to him had no effect. I had PayPal freeze his account for not shipping the item. He ran a music website that solicited donations thru the same PayPal account. I contacted his host, who shut down that site based on the PayPal documentation. He listed a PO Box for 'donations' and payment for eBay sales. I contacted the postmaster at that zip with copies of the information, and my next correspondence to him at that P O Box came back 'box closed.' I was surprised when the item showed up in the mail twelve months later.

Along with several others, I was scammed by a guy on the Swap List 3-4 years ago. He contradicted himself with promises "will ship, have shipped", etc. He said he spent the money I sent (yet continued to sell on the list and receive new PayPal payments). He mentioned in an early email that he worked for a local TV station. That was the only truth I got from the guy. His town had only one TV station, and a couple of calls to him at his job caused him to provide a refund. I think others were not so fortunate. The guy was banned but has reappeared on the list under different emails. Each time I report the guy to a nanny with the history, and they are good about getting him off the list. I haven't seen anything from him in a couple of years.

You are right to not rush to provide bad feedback. Even a deal gone sour may eventually be resolved.

Dennis in Buffalo

Dennis,

Thanks for sharing your horror stories. Hitting people where they live - their PayPal account, their PO Box, at work - can do wonders when someone is trying to scam you. We've recently taken steps on the Swap List to make it easier to track down people.

Dan

Installing Tiger on an iMac without a DVD Drive

Matthew Wright says:

Hey Dan,

I helped another friend install Tiger on an iMac without a DVD drive, only this time I didn't have a Tiger disc that would boot my laptop (a recent Intel MBP that needed at least 10.4.6) in order to choose the iMac as an external drive in Target Disk Mode.

The following might be old news to you, but I'd never heard of this working before: Just out of curiosity I tried something. I put the Tiger (10.4) disk in the MacBook Pro, then booted it into target disk mode, and then connected the two machines together. The iMac mounted both the MacBook Pro and the DVD in its drive on the desktop. After that System Preferences' "Startup Disk" (after a lot of spinning) recognized the install DVD on the MBP as a boot disk, and I was able to restart the iMac from the MacBook Pro's DVD drive.

If this is old news, sorry to tell you something you already know. I just thought it was so cool that it worked. if this bizarre two degree of separation install is any help to you or LEM, thought I'd drop you a line.

best,
matthew

Matthew,

Thanks for sharing your experience. When you boot a Mac in FireWire Disk Mode, all its volumes are available to the machine booting from it - even the Tiger install DVD.

Dan

OS X Boot Problems with a Blue & White G3

Mark Looper writes:

Hello-

A few month ago I bought a blue & white G3/350 to use as a backup server; I intended to install OS X 10.3 on it and use external SATA drives with it via a PCI card. When I bought it, it had a non-stock video card that did not work with OS X, so I picked up a stocker on eBay. In this configuration, basically stock (768 MB RAM, 6 GB hard disk - well, RAM's not stock!), I found that the machine would boot from my DiskWarrior 3 CD that had OS X 10.2.3 on it, but not from my newer CD with OS X 10.3.7; however, it did boot from my 10.3 install CD.

Odd, I thought, but what the heck; I then installed the PCI card and external SATA drive, and installed 10.3 on that drive (and updated to 10.3.9). The machine, at the time, booted from the external SATA drive without problems. The PCI card was not recognized by OS 9.2.2 when booted from the old 6 GB drive (it was the card that came with the LaCie external SATA drive), but I could force it to boot from the OS X drive by holding down Cmd-Opt-Shift-delete to bypass the OS 9 drive. (Firmware is fully updated, BTW.)

However, it was always my intention to boot OS X from an internal drive; for one thing, that would be recognized in the OS 9 Startup Disk control panel! So recently I got around to transplanting my 120 GB drive (biggest the Blue & White G3 can handle on its internal controller) from my G4/933 - and at this point, the machine refused to boot from the OS X 10.3 install CD! Moreover, it now refused to boot from the external SATA drive with 10.3.9 on it! What the heck???

I have installed 10.2.8 on the internal drive and am now able to do just about everything I'd planned (one of the advantages of Retrospect being updated so slowly is that the current version runs on anything back to OS X 10.1.5!). However, I wondered if you or any of your readers has any experience with this kind of behavior.

Did I somehow mess up something in Open Firmware? That's about all I can guess. I removed the PCI card, which is always a suspect where there is flaky behavior (despite earlier success), but it made no difference. Again, I can live with 10.2.8, but I want to make sure that, over time, the system won't regress to only booting 10.1.5, then 10.0.4, then the Public Beta....

Thanks!

-Mark Looper

Mark,

I've had weird problems with my own blue & white G3 as well. Again, a pretty much stock configuration, but once OS X 10.3 (IIRC) was installed, it wouldn't boot into OS X. That was going to be one of my testbed Macs, so it kind of went on the back burner.

One thing to keep in mind is that OS X is much more picky about RAM and OS 9 was. You might have some luck removing 1 or 2 RAM modules - although that didn't help in my situation.

Best bet is probably to join our G-List mailing list on Google Groups. Search the archive, and if that doesn't help, ask. We have over 900 people on the list, so there's a good chance someone will be able to help.

Dan

Dan Knight has been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.

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