scsi – Jon Thysell

My Mac SE/30 Part VIII: SCSI2SD Setup #2

September 23, 2021December 8, 2021Hardware3 Comments

In Part VII of this series, I planned out the configuration for the SCSI2SD I’ve installed in my vintage Macintosh SE/30. Now it’s time to actually set everything up.

As described in my last post, I plan to divide up a 2 GB SD card like this:

Partition Name	Description	Type	Sector Offset	Size (Sectors)	Size (Bytes)
SCSI2SD	Backup Utils	FAT	0	65,536	33,554,432 (32 MB)
	Unallocated	–	65,536	2,048	1,048,576 (1MB)
Macintosh SD	SCSI 1	HFS	67,584	3,670,016	1,879,048,192 (1.75 GB)
	Unallocated	–	3,737,600	184,320	94,371,840 (90 MB)
Total				3,921,920	2,008,023,040 (1.87 GB)

My partition setup for a 2 GB SD card (1 sector = 512 KB)

Creating the FAT partition

The first step is to create the 32 MB partition at the start of the card. Usually SD cards come with an existing file system, so the first thing we need to do is remove it. On Windows 10 you can launch the Disk Management control panel by bringing up the Start menu, typing “disk management” and selecting Create and format hard disk partitions.

Disk Management - New 2GB SD Card — Disk Management – New 2 GB SD Card

On my PC, the card is mounting as the F: drive, and you can see it already has an existing FAT file system that spans the entire card. The first task is to delete that file system. This is as simple as right-clicking on that F: drive at the bottom of the window and selecting Delete Volume….

You’ll be prompted that this will delete everything – go ahead and click Yes. Afterwards it should look something like this:

Disk Management – Unallocated 2 GB SD Card

Now we want to add our new 32 MB FAT file system. Right-click on the unallocated space for F:, select New Simple Volume…, then click Next >. Here’s where you’ll set the size to 32 MB:

New Simple Volume Wizard – Specifying Volume Size

After clicking Next > again, you’ll be prompted to pick the new drive letter. It’s annoying that you can’t keep using F: here, but don’t worry, you can change it later if you really want to. On my computer it picked K:. I just took a note of the new drive letter and clicked Next > again. Here’s where you’ll be prompted to pick the type of file system and give the volume a name.

As per my table above, I’ve picked FAT and set the label to “SCSI2SD”:

New Simple Volume Wizard – Specifying File System and Label

Click Next > and then Finish to create the new partition. Afterwards, Disk Management looked like this:

Disk Management – New 32 MB FAT Partition

Perfect! I now have my 32 MB FAT partition and an approximate 1.84 GB of unallocated space for SCSI2SD to use. More importantly: I have the peace of mind that I can insert this card into any computer without risking an accidental format which corrupts my vintage mac data.

Configuring the SCSI2SD

The next step is to configure the SCSI2SD, which means we’re done with the Disk Management tool and can return the SD card to the SCSI2SD. Then we’ll need to go and download the latest scsi2sd-util6 and (if you’re out of date) the latest firmware file for your model.

There’s a quick start guide (at the link above) that details installing the PC driver, connecting your PC to the SCSI2SD via a USB cable, and flashing the latest firmware file. Once you’ve done all that, it’s time to use the scsi2sd-util6.exe tool to configure the SCSI2SD.

For my model SCSI2SD (a 2020 V6), installed in my SE/30, this is how I configure the General Settings tab:

Next it’s time to set up the virtual SCSI devices. I select the Device 1 tab and configure it accordingly:

Now, you might be asking, “Why am I setting up the 32 MB FAT partition” as a SCSI device? Will the classic mac be able to use it?

Unfortunately, no. While various vintage mac utilities will see that the device exists, they won’t be able to access any files on it. However, the SCSI2SD V6 has an interesting feature, where, when you plug it into your PC with the USB cable, it will try to expose the SCSI devices to the computer as USB drives. So by setting this virtual device up, the 32 MB FAT drive appears on my PC and files can be managed directly without having to to remove the card. It’s not strictly necessary, but it is a nice bonus perk.

Anyway, on to the Device 2 tab, where again I set the values according to the table above:

You’ll notice that I haven’t done anything to “spoof” a particular drive by modifying the values for Vendor, Product ID, etc. Other guides often recommend using particular settings here, so that you can use the official Apple tools to format the new drive. The official tools only support specific drive models, and so must be tricked into thinking that’s what’s connected.

However, after much painful experimentation, I’ve found that neither Apple HD SC Setup (for System 6) nor Drive Setup (for System 7) works properly for this, even if you trick it into running. The newly setup drive will report its capacity incorrectly and suffer from constant data corruption and loss. I tried many times and was never even able to install a fresh system onto it.

In the end, I found that the only working way to set up the mac drive was to use the 3rd-party formatting tool Lido, which has no restrictions on what drives it can format, and works flawlessly.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After setting this all up, the next step is to save it to the device, by selecting File > Save to device. I’ve also found it prudent save a backup of this configuration to my PC by doing File > Save to file… and naming it scsi2sd.xml. After that you’re ready to (safely) eject and disconnect the USB cable. Now the SCSI2D is ready to be used on my SE/30.

Some finishing touches

But before we switch to the SE/30, I have a couple more “quality of life” tricks I’d like to share, revolving around the card’s little FAT partition. I’ve curiously described as for “Backup Utils” and that’s what I use it for: backing up copies of all PC-side files I used to set up the device.

So, reinserting the card back into my PC, my drive now looks something like this:

You can see copies of the scsi2sd-util6 tools, the latest firmware, the quick start guide PDF, and the configuration backup scsi2sd.xml we just created. But there’s also two other files: dd.exe and manage.cmd.

If you’re familiar with common Unix utilities, dd.exe is just dd for Windows. It’s a small but powerful utility for reading and writing directly to a drive by sectors, making it very useful tool for creating and restoring backups as disk images.

The other file, manage.cmd, is something I whipped up myself. It’s a small script which makes it easier to use dd.exe to backup and restore the SCSI2SD virtual devices as individual image files.

Launching it provides this menu:

This is part of the reason why I saved my SCSI2SD config as the file scsi2sd.xml. Manage.cmd reads this file to determine which sector ranges on the disk correspond to virtual devices. This is also why I explicitly added the FAT partition as a device in the SCSI2SD config – so this script would be able to see it.

Now typing “1” and pressing enter, the script will prompt me, for each virtual drive, where to save a backup disk image. Then it will invoke dd.exe with the proper arguments to save off the image files:

To restore those image files, it’s as simple as entering “2” at the menu, and you’ll be walked through the reverse – prompting for the image files you wish to write back to the SD card. It’s not the most sophisticated system, and still doesn’t give me direct access to files within those images, but it’s a little nicer than having to run dd.exe by hand.

Note: The manage.cmd script expects to be run from the actual SCSI2SD SD card, as it uses that location to determine which disk to read and write from. If you use it, make sure that you also keep a backup copy of your scsi2sd.xml file in a place other than the actual SD card.

Well, that’s it for this post. Stay tuned for Part IX, where we’ll get back onto the SE/30 and start setting up a working system!

/jon

Want to read from the beginning? Start at Part I.

P.S. My thoughts on how to plan, execute, and document setting up my SCSI2SD was largely influenced by these two blog posts: SCSI2SD: Using a SCSI2SD adapter to setup your 68k Macintosh and Apple IIe Card and SCSI2SD: How I have my SCSI2SD setup for my Apple IIe card in my LC 475. Enormous thanks to the folks at savagetaylor.com for all of their detailed posts on classic macs and the SCSI2SD.

My Mac SE/30 Part VII: SCSI2SD Setup #1

September 17, 2021September 23, 2021Hardware2 Comments

In Part VI of this series, I replaced the dead hard drive in my vintage Macintosh SE/30 with a modern SCSI2SD.

Next I’ll need to set up and configure the SCSI2SD to meet my needs. Now, despite the wonderful versatility of the device, its configuration is not for the faint of heart, especially when used in a vintage Macintosh. Thankfully this isn’t the first time I’ve tangled with configuring a SCSI2SD – when I initially restored my Power Macintosh 8600/200, I also used a SCSI2SD instead of a standard hard drive. In fact, I used this exact SCSI2SD!

See Adventures in Macintosh restoration Part VI: Booting up and jacking in for that story.

In short, the power of the SCSI2SD is that it can be set up to emulate one or more virtual drives all on a single SD card. However classic macs (or at least, the official disk tools needed to set up a new drive) are picky about the brands and models of drives they support. So while you can set up your SCSI2SD virtual drives to “spoof” those blessed drives, the configuration software is not very user friendly.

Sectors not files

The biggest annoyance with the SCSI2SD is how it stores these drives on the SD card. You’d expect that it would just use a standard formatted SD card with each virtual drive stored as a separate “image file”, like with the Floppy Emu. Instead the SCSI2SD writes directly to a range of raw sectors on the SD card, ignoring anything else about how the card is set up.

So if you pop the SD card into your PC, you won’t see obvious files like “Disk 1.dsk” or anything. In fact the default SCSI2SD configuration is a 2 GB virtual drive written to sector zero at the very beginning of the card. Which is actually kind of a problem.

Now, this is a simplification, but sector zero is usually where the filesystem information (the names and locations of each file) is stored. A PC will look at sector zero for a filesystem it understands, which these days is typically FAT, FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS. It won’t recognize a vintage filesystem that may be there. So when it doesn’t find the data it expects, it’ll assume the disk needs to be formatted, and will prompt you to do so.

Accepting that prompt will, in all likelihood, completely corrupt or destroy the data on your card. Yikes!

With this setup, the best you can do is always remember to say no to formatting, which will preserve your data, but also severely limit how you can interact with it. You can still use modern disk imaging utilities to back up the entire SD card to an image file on your computer. However you won’t be able to easily separate out multiple virtual drives, let alone transfer individual files in or out of them.

A better setup

While complete disk images are useful (and better than no backup), I’ve found a better setup which makes life a little easier on myself.

The trick is to put a modern filesystem on the card, starting at sector zero, but not take up the entire disk with it. If I only create a small 32 MB FAT partition, and leave the rest of the disk “unallocated”, then when I stick the card into a PC, it’ll see that small filesystem and not prompt me to format anything. The PC will ignore all of the unallocated space after the partition, so that’s where I’ll configure the SCSI2SD to write its data.

By keeping them separated in this way, neither the PC nor the SCSI2SD will ever interfere with one another in regular, everyday usage. You can add or remove files on that small FAT partition without ever worrying that you’re corrupting the vintage data managed by the SCSI2SD.

Okay, but why only a 32MB FAT drive? Why so small?

While my space needs for this vintage SE/30 are small, I don’t really intend to use the FAT partition for all that much. So there’s no need to take away a bunch of space that the SCSI2SD could be using. In fact, as we’ll see later, I only intend on using the FAT partition to store some useful tools relevant for using the SCSI2SD.

Disk planning for my SE/30

Speaking of my SE/30, my original plan was to have two virtual drives for this machine, one with System 7.5.5, and another with System 6.0.8 for older, “32-bit dirty” applications. For more information about what “32-bit dirty” means, see My Mac SE/30 Part IV: Upgrade Plans.

However, while people may have “dual-booted” back in the day, in my experiments I found that keeping a System 6 setup was completely unnecessary. There’s really nothing I can’t do in System 7 – if I need to run “32-bit dirty” apps, it’s easy enough to just toggle the switch in the Memory control panel and reboot. Actually switching between System 6 and 7 meant toggling the switch and letting each system “rebuild the desktop file” on the disk every time it restarted, which was annoying.

Ultimately, I found it much easier to just keep a set of System 6 images on my Floppy Emu, and plan on booting from floppy if I ever really need to run System 6. With that decision made, the biggest question now was how big of a disk did I need for System 7.5.5?

The maximum size of a classic mac drive (using the vintage HFS filesystem partition) is 2 GB. Realistically, I’ll probably never need that much space on this machine. I mean, the old drive in this machine wasn’t even 0.5 GB and would have been crazy expensive at the time. At my first pass, since I only want to manage one virtual drive, my first instinct is to create a 2 GB disk on a 2 GB SD card.

However, just because an SD card is advertised as being 2 GB, doesn’t mean it can literally store 2,147,483,648 bytes of data. Beyond the regular manufacturer marketing shenanigans of memory bytes vs storage bytes, different SD cards from different manufacturers may have different numbers of actual bytes available.

Which means, rather than use all of the unallocated space for my virtual drive, it’s safer for me to make the disk smaller and leave a decent safety buffer at the end. That way if my card dies and needs to be replaced with a new one that happens to be slightly smaller, I won’t have to worry about my backups not fitting.

Anyway, in the end, I decided to set up my 2 GB SD card like this:

Partition Name	Description	Type	Sector Offset	Size (Sectors)	Size (Bytes)
SCSI2SD	Backup Utils	FAT	0	65,536	33,554,432 (32 MB)
	Unallocated	–	65,536	2,048	1,048,576 (1MB)
Macintosh SD	SCSI 1	HFS	67,584	3,670,016	1,879,048,192 (1.75 GB)
	Unallocated	–	3,737,600	184,320	94,371,840 (90 MB)
Total				3,921,920	2,008,023,040 (1.87 GB)

My partition setup for a 2 GB SD card (1 sector = 512 KB)

I have two main partitions: the 32 MB FAT drive at the start to satisfy modern machines, and a 1.75 GB HFS drive for my SE/30. I’ve also put a small 1 MB buffer between the partitions for a little extra safety and separation, and finally there’s some 90 MB of buffer at the end of the disk.

With that plan in mind, stay tuned for Part VIII, where I’ll walk through the steps of actually setting up the SD card in this fashion.

/jon

Want to read from the beginning? Start at Part I.

My Mac SE/30 Part VI: SCSI2SD Installation

June 11, 2021September 17, 2021Hardware9 Comments

In Part V of this series I upgraded the RAM and ROM in the vintage Macintosh SE/30 that I’ve been restoring. In this post, I replace the old dead hard drive with a modern SCSI2SD.

As mentioned in Part II, the hard drive that came in this machine was a 426 MB Segate ST1480N, an upgrade from a previous owner. It doesn’t boot anymore but that’s no surprise – it’s 27 years old at this point. I tried hooking it up to my bridge Power Mac 8600/200, but it didn’t even recognize a drive was connected.

In any case, my plan was always to replace the drive in this SE/30 with a SCSI2SD, which, if you aren’t aware, is a modern device that can simulate one or more SCSI drives using an SD card for storage:

Mounting options

I’ll cover setting up the software side of the SCSI2SD in a later post, for now, the goal is just to get it physically installed and hooked up where the old hard drive used to be. At first glance, it seems pretty straight-forward, but there’s a few minor problems.

First off, the original hard drive screws into the sides of SE/30’s metal drive caddy, and the SCSI2SD only has bottom mounting screw holes. Given that the SCSI2SD is just an exposed circuit board, even if you could mount it, you wouldn’t want the metal caddy to short anything underneath the board.

Secondly, the original hard drive was oriented such that the side with the SCSI port was to the rear of the machine. If I mount the SCSI2SD the same way, then the side with the SD card and USB port will be pointing inside. One of the main reasons I want to use the SCSI2SD is to be able to easily access the SD card to transfer files, make backups, or even swap it out for testing alternate cards. As-is, I’d have to take the case off every time to get to the card, or to connect a USB cable to configure the device itself.

Thankfully, Colin from This Does Not Compute solved both of these problems by designing a custom SCSI2SD Bracket for the Mac SE/30. Instead of mounting to the drive caddy, the 3D-printed plastic bracket mounts to the back of the SE/30’s chassis, and aims both the SD card slot and the USB port out the rear of the case. As detailed in his video, the SE/30 supports expansion cards, and so there’s a small opening in the rear of the case to expose any extra ports those expansion cards might have.

Since I have zero plans for adding any expansion cards, I decided to go with his bracket. He doesn’t sell them but he open-sourced the design, and since I don’t have a 3D-printer of my own, and since this was my first ever time needing a 3D-printed part for a project, I finally got to see what it takes to get someone else to make it for me.

The process was easier than I expected. After getting a little lost looking at sites that handled bulk orders, I found makexyz, an on-demand service that will forward your job to a local printer to print your one-off part. I just uploaded the STL file, kept the default settings, and in a week or so I got the bracket in the mail:

Extending the LED wire

While I waited for the bracket to arrive, I set to solving another problem. The SE/30’s case has small LED in the front that wires to two pins on the hard drive in order to show disk activity. The SCSI2SD does have pin holes for an activity LED, however with the SCSI2SD flipped around, the original wire doesn’t reach.

Wanting that LED to be functional, and not wanting to modify the original wires in any way, I finally invested in a set of various connectors and crimps and made a custom “extension wire”:

I also added a matching header to the SCSI2SD board. Hooking up the LED is very much optional, but I was positively ecstatic to see it flashing when all was said and done. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Minor bracket adjustments

When the bracket arrived, it came time to actually install it into the machine. However I hadn’t noticed that in Colin’s setup he had removed the original hard drive caddy in order for his bracket to fit. I, on the other hand, intended on leaving the empty caddy in so I wouldn’t ever misplace it.

This was almost a non-issue, except for one tiny little spot where the bracket and caddy intersected. So I busted out my Dremel and cut a small groove in both the bracket and the SCSI2SD board itself:

Installation

With the grooves cut, the bracket cleared the caddy and installed quite easily:

Mac SE/30 with SCSI2SD Rear Mounted Closeup

The LED extension wire I made reached perfectly, and looking at the back of the machine, you can see where the bracket mounts to the expansion port slot to expose the SD card and USB port.

But now there was another problem. The SCSI port on the motherboard is near the rear of the machine, very close to the original hard drive’s port. As such, the original SCSI cable was very short, and though it’s kind of hard to see, it’s now stretched to its absolute limit to reach the port on the backwards SCSI2SD.

Not wanting to add any unnecessary strain on the parts, I went and ordered a new longer cable. And by new, I actually mean new! I assumed since SCSI cables aren’t used anymore I’d have to buy an old one, but I was happy to find someone making brand-new SCSI cables in various lengths. It worked perfectly:

Mac SE/30 with SCSI2SD Installed and Wired Up

The last thing to do was connect power. Now, the SCSI2SD can be powered one of three ways: directly over the SCSI cable (if the motherboard supports it), via USB (if you really want to run a cable there) or via a standard floppy power-cable.

While technically the device draws way less power than a traditional hard drive, and could therefore probably run off just the SCSI cable, I wasn’t sure that the SE/30 motherboard supported and I happened to have a spare Molex-to-floppy power adapter handy. So it was easy enough to continue using the existing hard drive power cable to power the SCSI2SD instead:

With the SCSI2SD installed, my planned hardware upgrades were complete. While there’s still work to be done inside, such as re-capping the analog board and completely cleaning and greasing the floppy drive, for now, it was finally time to close up the case.

I popped off the small door to the rear expansion slot (and taped it inside the case so I wouldn’t lose it), so here you can see the final result from the rear:

Mac SE/30 Rear with Expansion Door Removed

I think it looks quite clean, and since it’s recessed inside the case, it’s not immediately obvious that it’s even in there. The SD card sticks out a bit but doesn’t clear the case, so there’s little risk of accidentally bumping it.

That’s it for now, stay tuned for Part VII, where we finally turn to the software-side of restoring this machine.

/jon

Want to read from the beginning? Start at Part I.

Adventures in Macintosh restoration Part VIII: Fresh Setup

November 6, 2020March 16, 2021Hardware2 Comments

In Part VII, I experimented with a variety of Mac OS system software combinations on my Power Macintosh 8600/200. Now it’s time to finish up the experiments and get this machine up and running.

One more way to transfer files

The most important job a of a bridge machine is to be able to transfer files to older machines, and as I’ve explained in the previous parts, this machine is pretty flush with methods for doing so. However, before I got all that working, one of the first recommendations I got from other vintage mac fans was to try and add USB support with a Sonnet Tango PCI card.

I found one cheap on eBay, brand new and still in the box:

Sonnet Tango 2.0 USB Extension Cable Closeup

It was a quick and pretty effortless install into one of the machine’s open PCI slots. While it requires Mac OS 9 to operate, and then only at USB 1.1 speeds, it has quickly become one of my favorite methods for transferring files.

Mac OS 9 can understand FAT32 filesystems, so rather than deal with floppies, burning CDs, or the relatively slow network, I’ve found that the fastest and often most convenient option is to just use a little USB drive. The biggest issue was having to reach to the back of the machine to access the ports, but thankfully the card has an “internal” port, so I was able to route a USB extension cable out front slot for the missing ZIP drive.

SCSI2SD second thoughts

It’s now, when I’m all ready to set up this machine with its “final” setup, that I start to question my use of the SCSI2SD. It’s a very useful and powerful device, but it’s also kind of expensive. Beyond being a “drop-in” replacement for a SCSI hard drive, it’s useful to be able to remove the SD card to make backups, add/remove files, etc. But this machine already has so many ways of transferring files, and having to pop open the case to remove an SD card is pretty inconvenient by comparison.

As I’ve mentioned before, my true goal is to a restore an older compact mac. This current machine is just a tool toward that end, so it seems a little wasteful to dedicate a SCSI2SD for it, if the long-term fate of this machine is to be stored away and only used when needed. Plus, any future compact mac will have probably need a hard drive replacement of its own, where the benefits of a SCSI2SD may be better appreciated.

Revisiting SCSI

So rather than plan on forking out the money for another SCSI2SD in the future, I decided to take out the one I have and re-look into my options for installing a real SCSI hard drive into this machine. In Part VI I mentioned the lack of new SCSI hard drives, and the problem with old ones is finding one that still works.

However, while SCSI ultimately failed in the consumer market, many of the newer SCSI drives that do exist are still backwards compatible with the older SCSI protocol, given an appropriate cable adapter.

So I consulted r/VintageApple for advice, and after trolling around online I ended up scoring an 18 GB SCSI hard drive for $5, with free shipping even! As for the cable adapter, a reddit user who had already done the exercise of buying every possible adapter pointed me to the only one that actually works as advertised.

SCA 80 - IDC50 Male Header, w/ Active Termination

Since the drive was originally intended for server racks, it’s slower, larger, and louder than comparable consumer drives, but the price simply couldn’t be beat.

It worked perfectly with a patched copy of Drive Setup, and I partitioned the drive three ways – a 11GB HFS+ primary partition for Mac OS 9.2, a 2GB HFS partition for Mac OS 7.6, and a 4GB HFS partition for miscellaneous data.

Installing Mac OS 7.6

Once the hard drive was partitioned, I went ahead and installed Mac OS 7.6 first. I didn’t screenshot the whole process, but for the benefit of any future person who’s never had to install 7.6 on a Power Mac in 2020, here’s a rough outline of what I did:

Boot from the 7.6.1 install CD (hold “c” if necessary)
Run “Install Mac OS”
1. Skip straight to Step 4, “Install the software”
2. Customize the install according to the suggestions here:
  1. MacOS 7.6.1 Update
  2. QuickDraw 3D
  3. MacLinkPlus
  4. English Text-To-Speech
3. Under Options, check “Create new System Folder”
4. Install to the 2GB partition I set up for 7.6
5. Start!
6. For everything else, just select “Easy Install”
Reboot when finished

Then, after the machine booted back up from the hard drive, it’s time to update some settings in the Control Panel:

Configure Energy Saver to “Shut down instead of sleeping” and set the timer to “Never”
Open Control Panel > TCP/IP
1. Confirm you want to enable TCP/IP after the panel closes
2. Connect via Ethernet
3. Configure to use the DHCP server
4. Exit, saving configuration
Open Control Panel > Control Strip
1. Hide Control Strip
Open the Extensions Manager, and disable the following “Control Panels”:
1. Control Strip
Again in the Extensions Manager, and disable the following “Extensions”:
1. Color SW 1500
2. Color SW 2500
3. Color SW Pro
4. Desktop Printer Extension
5. Desktop Printer Spooler
6. Desktop PrintMonitor
7. ImageWriter
8. Iomega Driver
9. LaserWriter 300/LS
10. LaserWriter 8
11. Printer Share
12. PrintingLib
13. PrintMonitor
14. StyleWriter 1200

Finally, I installed the 2020Patch Extension so I can set the date past 2020. And here we are, only 8.5MB used at boot:

Now, these particular settings might not be right for everyone, as they reflect my setup: I have a TCP/IP network, but no printers, and I have never been a fan of the Control Strip. Now on to the primary OS for this machine, OS 9.2.2.

Installing Mac OS 9.2.2

The road to Mac OS 9.2.2 is a little more involved, but again, here’s an outline of what I did:

Boot from the 9.1 install CD (hold “c” if necessary)
Run “Mac OS Install”
1. Under Options, check “Perform Clean Installation”
2. Install to the 11GB partition I set up for 9.2
3. Start!
4. Continue and Agree until you see another “Start” button
5. Customize with just the following:
  1. Mac OS 9.1
  2. Internet Access (Custom)
    1. Internet Utilities
    2. Microsoft > Internet Explorer
  3. Text-to-Speech
  4. ColorSync
6. Start!
Reboot when finished

After the machine reboots, complete the Setup Assistant. Then, as before, it’s time to update some settings in the Control Panel:

Configure Energy Saver to “Shut down instead of sleeping” and set the timer to “Never”
Open Control Panel > TCP/IP
1. Confirm you want to enable TCP/IP after the panel closes
2. Connect via Ethernet
3. Configure to use the DHCP server
4. Exit, saving configuration
Open Control Panel > Control Strip
1. Hide Control Strip

Now we’ve got a pretty clean 9.1 install, but we want 9.2.2. To do that we’re going to need to get three things onto the machine:

Once you have that, you’ll need to do the following:

Open the “Mac OS 9.2.1 Update” and mount the disk image
Run “OS 9 Helper 1.0.1”
1. Select “Install Mac OS 9.2.1”
2. Begin Installation
3. Continue and Agree until you see another Start Button
4. Customize with the following:
  1. Mac OS 9.2.1
  2. ColorSync
Start!
Reboot when finished

After the reboot, complete the Setup Assistant again, then:

Open the “Mac OS 9.2.2 Update” and mount the disk image
Run “OS 9 Helper 1.0.1”
1. Select “Install Mac OS 9.2.2”
2. Begin Installation
3. Continue and Agree until you see another Start Button
Start!
Reboot when finished

After the reboot, complete the Setup Assistant one final time. Now we can clean up the Control Panel – I used the list here to get started:

Open the Extensions Manager, and disable the following “Control Panels”:
1. Control Strip
2. Location Manager
3. Multiple Users
4. Software Update
5. USB Printer Sharing
Again in the Extensions Manager, and disable the following “Extensions”:
1. Color SW 1500
2. Color SW 2500
3. Color SW Pro
4. Control Strip Extension
5. CSW 6000 Series
6. Desktop Printer Extension
7. Desktop Printer Spooler
8. Desktop PrintMonitor
9. FBC Indexing Scheduler
10. ImageWriter
11. Iomega Driver
12. LaserWriter 300/LS
13. LaserWriter 8
14. Location Manager Extension
15. Multi-User Startup
16. Printer Share
17. PrintingLib
18. PrintMonitor
19. USB Printer Sharing Extension

And here we are, only 16.6MB used at boot:

That’s it for today, I think I’ve got one more post left in me for this machine, so stay tuned for Part IX!

/jon

Want to read from the beginning? Start at Part I.

Adventures in Macintosh restoration Part VII: System Experiments

October 11, 2020March 16, 2021Hardware2 Comments

In Part VI, I was able to install Mac OS 8.1 on my Power Macintosh 8600/200 using a SCSI2SD as the machine’s hard drive, and I was even able to get online. Now it’s time to play around with that setup.

The original plan

The plan for this machine has always been as a bridge machine between modern computers and older vintage Macs. It’s meant to give me some practice cleaning and restoring old parts, while also being as flexible and compatible as possible. It’s a utility machine.

In order to be the most compatible with the most software and the most hardware, I figured I’d need to install as many versions of Mac OS as possible. This machine officially supports System 7.5.5 through Mac OS 9.1, but rather than install the dozen of minor versions in-between, I thought one install per major version should be enough.

System 7

Let’s start with System 7. As far as I can remember, my childhood machines ran 7.0.1 or 7.1, older than what this new machine can handle. I remember the 7.5 series existing, and it’s possible that in the later years I ran it on the Centris 650 when I first got internet access.

System 7.5.5 is the earliest software this machine can run, and it’s the last version to support running 24-bit addressing (something the oldest programs need). The other contender for System 7 would be 7.6.1, which is considered mostly the same, except it’s got some PowerPC performance improvements that would apply to this machine.

In the end I actually chose 7.6.1 for this machine. It turns out the 24-bit support only applies to the 68k Macs, and this machine will never be able to run programs that need it. So 7.6.1 has the exact same compatibility as 7.5.5 but is just faster.

Beyond System 7

After System 7, we’re out of my personal experience. I may have used Mac OS 8 once or twice in high school, but I’ve never used Mac OS 9. I have no nostalgia for these systems, so the only requirement is to expand my access to software and hardware.

My initial plan was to pick just the latest in each line that I could run, Mac OS 8.6 and Mac OS 9.1. While I’m currently running 8.1, and having a little fun here and there playing some old games, as far as I can tell there’s no reason to run this version with newer ones available.

However, talking with people online, and it seems there are three camps when it comes to OS 8.

Camp one thinks System 7 was the pinnacle of Mac systems in terms of design and speed, and everything after that was bloat. They point out that the change from 7 to 8 was just to cut out the clone manufacturers, since they only had licenses to System 7. So 8 is really just a bunch of crap on top of 7.

Camp two thinks OS 8 is the pinnacle of Mac design, that 8 refined and filled in all of the gaps of 7. They say System 7 is too spartan for newer machines, and point out that 8 added better networking support and just as importantly, support for larger hard drives.

Camp three thinks OS 8 can be skipped entirely, thanks to Mac OS 9. Very little software lists OS 8 as a minimum, and even so, it’ll still run on OS 9. Same with hardware. Most things just work on 7 and above, or require 9, so unless you really like the style of 8, there’s no reason to use it if you can run 9.

I already planned on installing 9 as it gives me access to a variety of useful hardware upgrades on this machine such as USB and Firewire. So I decided to table the decision on OS 8 for now.

Let the experiments begin!

The first thing I did was backup the SD card with Mac OS 8.1. It doesn’t have anything particular that I care about, other than being a booting system. I re-setup the SCSI2SD with three virtual drives, then booted the 8.1 CD to use Drive Setup to format them.

I had already downloaded and burned CD images for a variety of versions: 7.5.5 and 7.6.1 specifically for this model, universal installs for 8.0, 8.5.1, and 8.6, and finally universal installs for 9.1 and 9.2.2.

I won’t go into all of the gory details here, but suffice it to say that I spent weeks installing and re-installing different OSes to the different virtual drives. I followed various suggestions online and took my own notes during the installation process of each. I ran benchmarks, browsed the web, and downloaded some apps and games to try out.

One win was getting an FTP server to run on the Mac, which meant I could more easily transfer files to it from a modern PC. That freed me up to download new software quickly on my PC, then upload the files to the Mac at my leisure. This gave me both an archive of downloads on the PC and saved me from having to browse the web on the Mac and deal with increased chance of download failures.

The other big win was installing Mac OS 9.2.2. Officially most machines can only run 9.1, because that was basically the last version of OS 9 meant to be run as an independent OS. By that point in time, Apple had switched over to OSX, but early versions still provided a “Classic Environment” compatibility layer that let those OSX users still run their old OS 9 apps.

Classic Environment still required a full copy of OS 9, and it got a few more stability and performance updates in the form of 9.2, 9.2.1, and 9.2.2. So installers exist for those versions, but of course they have protection measures in place to make sure you don’t just install them on older hardware.

However, thanks again to enterprising hackers, there’s a tool called os9helper that lets you trick the installer into working. And it worked!

The final plan

At the end of it all, I’d pretty much settled on a plan of only installing 7.6.1 and 9.2.2. I didn’t find any reason to keep 8 around, the installs sat dormant while I spent most of my time in 9.2.2. In fact, even keeping 7.6.1 around seemed to be “just-in-case”.

Anyway, this has been a pretty text-heavy post. I didn’t bother to take any pictures during all this software experimentation. Next time I’ll have more photos, as I dive into some hardware upgrades. So stay tuned for that in Part VIII!

/jon

Want to read from the beginning? Start at Part I.