system-7 – Jon Thysell

My Mac SE/30 Part IX: System 7.5 Boot Floppy

December 8, 2021Hardware1 Comment

In Part VIII of this series, I finished prepping a 2 GB SD card for the SCSI2SD that will serve as the primary disk for my vintage Macintosh SE/30. Now it’s time to get that disk formatted and a working system installed, but to do so I’ll need to create a boot floppy first.

As a quick recap, at this point I have a Macintosh SE/30 with a working floppy drive. I’ve installed 64 MB of RAM along with a GGLABS MACSIMM ROM replacement. I’m using the aforementioned SCSI2SD to simulate a single 1.75 GB hard drive, on which I intend to install System 7.5.5.

Formatting plan

The first thing I want to do is format that 1.75 GB drive with an HFS filesystem. The usual process is to boot from a floppy and use either the Apple HD SC Setup (for System 6) or Drive Setup (for System 7) program to format the drive. However, I’ve found that those programs don’t work well with the SCSI2SD. They don’t recognize the non-Apple drive by default, and even if you get a “patched” version which does, the resulting disk will have data corruption problems.

The solution is to use the third-party disk formatter Lido 7.5.6. It works perfectly fine with the SCSI2SD, however it doesn’t come preinstalled on a bootable floppy. So the actual first thing I need to do is to make a bootable floppy.

Creating the boot floppy

While there are many methods for doing this, I decided that since I’m planning on installing 7.5.5, that I wanted a 7.5.5 boot floppy. However by this time system CDs were becoming the norm, so the closest I could find was Apple’s System 7.5 Network Access Disk.

It’s provided as a disk image stored in a MacBinary-encoded self-extracting archive, so the first step is to download it onto a working classic mac and extract the disk image with Stuffit Expander. Then you can use the Disk Copy program to write the extracted “Network Access.image” file to a real floppy.

This is where having a bridge machine, like the Power Macintosh 8600/200 I previously restored, comes in handy. I could have easily done the whole process, from download to physical floppy, right there. But let’s assume for a moment that you don’t have a bridge machine, is it still possible to create a vintage mac boot floppy? Yes!

Note: Okay, technically, if your vintage mac only accepts 400/800k disks, then the answer is no. You’ll need a real, already working vintage mac to write one of these older floppies.

What you’ll need to do is create a bridge machine in emulation, with something like Mini vMac. To be honest, I use Mini vMac as a bridge machine way more often than I use my PowerMac. Other than the lack of networking and CDs, it covers most of my needs quite well.

Now, I’m not going to detail how to get Mini vMac set up. There are already plenty of tutorials out there for that and it’s worthwhile to get comfortable with the program before continuing. What I’ve got set up is a Macintosh II running System 7.5.5 with Stuffit Expander and Disk Copy (as above), along with the apps ImportFI and ExportFI to get files into and out of the emulator.

Creating a raw DSK image file

Without access to a real mac floppy drive, what we want is a raw DSK image of the Network Access disk. That is, we want a file with a 1-to-1 copy of the bits of that bootable floppy, without any extraneous headers or metadata. To start, we’ll need to use Mini vMac to get the Disk Copy image out of the archive:

Download the Network_Access_Disk_7.5.sea.bin archive to your PC.
Use ImportFI to import the archive file into Mini vMac.
Use Stuffit Expander within Mini vMac to extract the archive’s contents.
Use ExportFI to export the “Network Access.image” file out of Mini vMac back to your PC.

Now, the file we’ve exported is almost what we need. It’s a Disk Copy 4.2 image with all of the data we want, but it’s still wrapped up in some metadata we don’t. To strip that metadata we’re going to use a tool called Convert2Dsk.

Convert2Dsk is a small command-line tool I wrote to convert Disk Copy 4.2 images into raw DSK images on modern PCs. It works on Windows, OSX, and Linux, can even handle image files that are BinHex (.hqx) or MacBinary (.bin) encoded. Simply pass it an image file (or folder of image files) and it’ll convert them into DSK files.

On Windows, it’s as simple as dragging the “Network Access.image” file onto convert2dsk.exe, which will then create the “Network Access.image.dsk” file we want.

Writing the raw DSK image to a floppy

Now that we have a raw DSK image, it’s time to write that file to a floppy disk. Obviously that means you’ll need a floppy drive and at least one 1.4 MB floppy disk. You can get an external USB floppy drive on eBay, though a pro-tip is to avoid the new stuff from China, and instead pick up an older used drive made by one of the big PC manufacturers. They may cost a little more but they’re of higher quality and less likely to give you problems. I bought an old Dell floppy drive for $20 and it works perfectly.

Software-wise, you’re going to need a program to read and write the disk images, and I use dd (for Windows). It’s a powerful command-line utility for utility (also on OSX and Linux) for reading and writing directly to a drive by sectors. So from a command-prompt I’ll call dd.exe like so:

dd.exe if=<image file> od=<floppy drive letter> --progress

Which, with the file we created earlier, and my USB floppy registered as the A: drive, looks like:

dd.exe if="Network Access.image.dsk" od=a: --progress

Running with a floppy inserted will overwrite its entire contents with the contents of the DSK file. If you see “80+0 records in” and “80+0 records out”, then the write worked and the floppy is ready to use. Pop the disk into the SE/30, flip the switch, and… it doesn’t boot.

Fixing a 7.5 disk to boot a SE/30 with an upgraded ROM

It turns out that the combination of a SE/30 with the MACSIMM ROM replacement (which is based on the IIsi ROM) isn’t recognized by System 7.5 and above as a valid Macintosh computer. Thankfully this problem can be solved by making a minor patch to the system files, as detailed in this post: Mac SE/30 with Upgraded ROM.

However, I found that post to be a little overzealous in its instructions. Their goal is to setup a machine with each and every system version, using a tool called System Picker to let you switch between them. While it works, it’s a tedious process, and as I’ve stated, I only want System 7.5.5. So, simplifying their steps, here’s what I did in Mini vMac:

Mount the raw DSK image as a floppy “Network Access.image.dsk” in Mini vMac.
Use ResEdit to open the “System” file in the “System Folder” on the disk.
1. Open the “gusd” resource.
2. Open “ID 1”.
3. Go to the 4th line (offset 000018) and change the end from 03 to 05. That is, the line should have changed from 0008 0003 0009 0003 to 0008 0003 0009 0005 as per below:

Save and close the file.
Eject the disk from Mini vMac.

Now if you write the modified disk image to a floppy using dd (as above), it should be bootable on the upgraded SE/30.

So that’s it, that’s how to create a System 7.5 boot floppy that will work on an SE/30 with an upgraded ROM. Stay tuned for Part X, where we’ll finally switch to the SE/30 and start setting up its disk drive.

/jon

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

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 IV: Upgrade Plans

April 29, 2021May 14, 2021Hardware2 Comments

In Part III of this series I took out (and cleaned) the motherboard and disk drives of my Macintosh SE/30. At that point, I was stuck waiting for the upgrades I’d ordered to arrive. But what upgrades exactly?

As I’ve mentioned before, the SE/30 is one of, if not the, most popular model of compact mac ever made. That’s largely due to its speed and expandability – the SE/30 is essentially a powerful Macintosh IIx crammed into the smaller Macintosh SE case. Both the SE/30 and the IIx use the Motorola 68030 processor running at 16MHz with a 68882 FPU coprocessor.

However, despite the many hardware similarities, the SE/30 has one decided limitation: its ROM is “32-bit dirty”, while the ROM of the IIx is “32-bit clean”. What does that mean? Well, the ROM in a classic mac is essentially a bit of permanent software on a (ROM) chip that’s responsible for booting the machine and interfacing between the system and with the hardware.

I won’t get into the history, but having a “32-bit dirty” ROM means the system is limited to a maximum 8MB of RAM. So the SE/30 can only use 8MB of RAM, while the identically powered IIx can use up to 128MB. This doesn’t matter much if you’re running System 6 (which itself is “32-bit dirty” and can only use 8MB of RAM), but if you’re running System 7, it’s an annoying limitation.

But there’s good news! As it turns out, while the software in the SE/30’s ROM can not be updated, the chip itself is actually on a small removable SIMM board. Same with the IIx. So it didn’t take long for enterprising mac enthusiasts to trying putting IIx ROM boards into their SE/30s, and voila, it actually works! With the swapped ROM the SE/30 can see up to 128 MB of RAM. From what I understand, it was a very popular upgrade, and a big part of why the SE/30 became so popular.

My SE/30’s RAM

With that, let’s return to me and my SE/30. While I want the machine to look cosmetically as original as possible, I do want to upgrade the internals a bit, especially the RAM.

As I mentioned in the last post, my SE/30 has the max factory configuration: 4MB spread across four 1MB RAM sticks. I also mentioned that the original seller claimed that the other four RAM slots weren’t functional. Right off the bat, it seems that I’m already at the limit for this particular machine.

Now, if I could get my hands on a IIx ROM board, I could swap out my four 1MB sticks for four 16MB sticks, bumping the RAM to 64MB. Not the absolute max of 128MB, but still a very worthy upgrade.

However, if it’s hard and expensive to track down vintage macs in good shape, it’s even harder and more expensive to find upgrade parts, especially for popular upgrades and especially for parts taken from other vintage macs. But there’s more good news – we don’t actually have to track down an original IIx ROM board.

Modern ROM Replacements

Enter modern enterprising mac enthusiasts, who have created new replacement ROM boards. There are two options in the market today: the GGLABS MACSIMM and the BMOW Mac ROM-inator II. Both are relatively cheap ROM boards that can be installed in SE/30s, as well as other compatible models. Furthermore, both provide useful “customization” options for how the ROM works.

One useful thing they do is path the ROM to disable the memory test at boot. While the 68030 processor is a beast for its time, running a full memory test on 16, let alone 64 or 128 MB of RAM at boot can take up to a full minute. (For reference, when rebooting my SE/30, as-is with System 6, the machine is back to the desktop almost before the startup chime finishes.)

Another patch adds HD20 support, which is a useful (but older) protocol for hard drives that connect via the external floppy port. While I don’t plan on getting or using an HD20 hard drive, it’s useful to have because my Floppy Emu can emulate such an HD20 hard drive, giving me an easy way to transfer large files to and from the machine via SD card.

Now, it’s here that the two products take different philosophical approaches. The base MACSIMM model stops with just the two patches – no memory test plus HD20 support. There’s also a “deluxe” model which adds a built-in, bootable “recovery” disk, so even if you have no other disks installed, or none of them are booting properly, you can still boot into a working system to troubleshoot your machine.

The Mac ROM-inator II on the other hand, comes in only one model, which includes the recovery disk functionality, but also a lot of other customizations as well. The startup chime, a classic hallmark of vintage macs, has been replaced with their own custom tune. The “Happy Mac” startup icon is replaced with a custom “Pirate Mac”, and the startup menu displays some info like the amount of RAM installed, how to boot the recovery disk, etc. Price-wise, it’s also cheaper than both models of the MACSIMM.

My SE/30’s ROM

I want to upgrade my SE/30’s RAM to at least 64MB and I want the HD20 support. With the Floppy Emu and the SCSI2SD, I don’t think I really need the recovery disk. Also, in keeping with my desire for the machine to look and feel original, I was actually turned off by all of the Mac ROM-inator II’s customizations.

In the end, despite having to pay a higher price, I went with the MACSIMM. It helped a little that the Mac ROM-inator II was out of stock at the time. Also, when I contacted GGLABS to confirm that the MACSIMM did not include similar “stylistic” customizations, he explained that he too preferred the basic setup, though he’d happily reflash his board with whatever alternate ROM image I gave him.

So I ordered the basic MACSIMM module and started looking for more RAM. Thankfully, unlike with the protracted ordeal I had finding RAM for the Power Mac 8600/200, I found a seller with 16MB sticks of compatible RAM quite quickly, and at a price within my remaining budget. Still, I limited myself to only ordering four sticks – I reasoned that without any guarantees that all eight slots worked, I didn’t want to waste any money up front. Plus, other than it being really cool, I still wasn’t even sure I’d find a way to use 64MB at once, let alone 128MB.

Alright, now that the plan’s in place, stay tuned for Part V, where I start actually upgrading my 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.