Using Mac OS X to create install disks for SE/30

ghall said:

Hi, my grandmother has an old SE/30 that she's going to give me if I can get it up and running again. It's in perfect working condition, except that the system is corrupt, so I need to reinstall the OS. The only problem is she no longer has the system disks. I know you can download the images for disks from Apple, but getting them onto the floppy disk is the part I am concerned about. I can get access to a USB floppy drive, so that's not a problem. The problem is, if I need any special software to format the disks. Thanks.

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I haven't tried it, but I'd be surprised if you can format the disks correctly out of OS X. Find someone with an older machine running OS9 and you have no problem. Good luck. If you can't get it to work, drop me a line. I've got a collection of old macs in my classroom and I can drop the images onto disk off of 9 or 8.6 and mail them to you. I'm guessing you would need the old drive utility to format the floppy's from X.

ghall said:

The problem is, if I need any special software to format the disks. Thanks.

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No, you don't need any special software - you need special hardware. See this thread over on the OSX Hints web site for a discussion of 800k disks.

ghall said:

Um, what? I'm pretty sure the Macintosh SE/30 used 3 1/2 inch floppies.

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3.5" Floppies came in
Single Sided Double Density (SSDD) 400 Kb
Double sided Double Density (DSDD) 800 Kb
and
Double sided High Density (DSHD) 1.4 Mb
(this drive was called the SuperDrive at the time, making the CD-RW/DVD-R optical drives the second type of drive to bear that name)
The 1.4 Mb DSHD floppies are identifiable by a second hole, on the other corner from the write-protect tab hole, and they should have HD embossed in the plastic. You cannot successfully format an 800 Kb floppy to 1.4, nor 1.4 to 800.

The SE/30 has the DSHD 1.4 Mb floppies, (the SuperDrive can also read and write the 800 Kb floppies) as did all later machines until the iBook, iMac and B&W G3 exorcised floppy disks, SCSI and serial ports from the Macintosh universe.

<d@*n, now I feel all old again. I thought I had successfully forgotton that arcana from the distant past...>

ghall said:

Um, what? I'm pretty sure the Macintosh SE/30 used 3 1/2 inch floppies.

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800k were 3.5 floppy's. But the SE/30 will take the 1.4mb (3.5in) floppy's, and the install disks will fit easier. One solution is to just find an old box of mac formatted floppy's. Then you could probably use the OS X method, although I'm not sure if X would recognize them, or attempt to reformat them. A SCSI zip might be another solution, or an external scsi drive, or scsi cd.

While you're at it, just crack the case, put a new HD in (the orignal was what, 40mb?) and update the ram to 128mb using the 8 ram slots in that baby. Man I loved that machine. You could run a ram disk with the entire contents of the HD on it.

ghall said:

Um, what? I'm pretty sure the Macintosh SE/30 used 3 1/2 inch floppies.

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Right, it did. The thread I pointed you to starts off talking about 3-1/2" (800k) floppies on Apple IIs, but it is all the same theme: there is special hardware in early Apple 3-1/2" drive mechanisms that let them spin at different rates depending on what track they're on. None of the newer mechanisms have that capability. Now that I think of it, though - didn't the SE/30 come with a FDHD (1.4mb) mechanism? That would bring things back into the realm of possibility with OSX.

ghall said:

Wouldn't a regular USB floppy drive work?

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Yes, the usb floppy will use the 1.4mb floppies you want to use. My only question again is, will OS X format the floppy in the format you need for the SE/30, or will it recognize a preformatted mac floppy? The only way to know, is to try it out. Good luck and post your results.

spork183 said:

While you're at it, just crack the case, put a new HD in (the orignal was what, 40mb?) and update the ram to 128mb using the 8 ram slots in that baby. Man I loved that machine. You could run a ram disk with the entire contents of the HD on it.

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Yeah... if you could find a third-height, 50 pin SCSI drive... those aren't really thick on the ground these days. Warning, almost all the SCSI drives on eBay are pulls from servers, so are 80 pin SCSI-2 (UltraSCSI connectors) or sometimes 68 pin SCSI. It is seldom successful to adapt these to a 50 pin SCSI-1 machine, because there is not enough room in the bay for both the drive and the adaptor.

Making SE/30 Discs

Hi folks...

Interesting topic... I've got 2 SE/30s I'm tarting up and having a play with at the moment.

The big problem is making the System discs. You can't use any SCSI stuff until you have a working System on the machine... in fact, to use the AppleCD (external SCSI CD) you need Apple's CD extension/INIT (which of course you will need to get onto a floppy!! Same goes for ZIPs.

To be honest, what I did was buy some second-hand System7.1 discs off eBay - they're only a few pounds and save so much headache! Then you can boot off the intall disc and put a fresh OS on your SE/30s HDD (assuming it works!). You may even find a load of apps on the HDD when you've resurrected the system folder. I have seen adverts for external USB FDDs that purport to READ/WRITE and FORMAT 1.4MB Mac floppies. Forget 800k - they need special hardware to write, and you'll never find new DD discs. Don't use HD discs with the hole taped over - the oxide on them is finer than on DD discs and you'll lose data.

The next problem you'll have is that a lot of software on the net for the SE/30 or indeed any classic Mac is .hqx .sit .bin etc etc compressed. You need Stuffit Expander (get version 4.0.1 if you're not running Sytem 7.5) but the distributions are very often... stuffed :-(
You'll need to Google like crazy to find an unstuffed one.

I'm in the happy position of owning an AppleCD external SCSI CD drive. You CAN burn compatible discs using 'disc utility' on OSX. Create a new image the size of your CD blanks, then click the image in disc utility and select 'Mac OS Standard' format. Then click erase. You can then drag stuff into your newly mounted disc on the desktop, and click 'burn' when you're ready.

To move stuff back and forth, a cheap SCSI ZIP 100 drive for the SE/30 and and cheap USB ZIP 100 for your newer machine is easest. You can get an ethernet card that goes in the PDS slot inside your SE/30 (!danger high voltages inside the case) but they're rare. If you have another working classic mac (maybe that has a CD drive or internet access) you can hook them up using the printer ports and form a LocalTalk network to shove files back and forth.

Hope this helps!

Fletch
SE/30, 18GB Seagate Barracuda HDD (2GB partitions), 68MB RAM, Asante Ethernet, AppleCD, Color Stylewriter 1500!

I got some old Mac software I found lying around on the internet and I got it onto my mac by using just a normal USB Floppy Drive and some Mac Formatted Floppy Disks (Not hfs+ formatted)

It takes like 12 floppies to hold 7.5.

you would actually need to install System 7.0 first before you could install system 7.5

The System 7.5 distro and such on Apples website isnt floppy images.

Its one big compressed image that is split up. You need to repiece them together then open it, so you'd have to locate somewhere a System 7-7.5 set of floppys, or even System 6.0.8 or w/e it originally shipped with.

If you had a start up floppy you could install with an Apple scsi externel CD drive.

I know this comes very late, but thought I'd share the info.

There's a 1.44MB image of "Network Access Disk" on Apple's "Older Software Downloads".

This at least allows you to boot the machine, where you could drag all non-Apple extensions, control panels and all "Preferences" out of the System Folder on the internal HD. If the SystemSuitcase is damaged (rare) then you'll still be in trouble.

The Disk allows you to connect to servers using a Local-Talk network (if you have one).

There is also a System 7.0.1 set of 1.44MB disk images here. Oddly, it's a self-mounting disk image with 6 disk images on it. It includes the full install and the "Disk Tools" disk.

Some "Net-Install" downloads can be turned back into floppy disks by making a floppy of the contents of each folder (you MUST use the name of the folder for the name of the floppy). Disk one is the main folder minus all the "disk folders". This is how a "Net-Install" of disk images is created. Sadly, the 7.5.3 download is the "CD-Install" and this can't be done. (Note the International version "Z" is still there).

Another trick I discovered years ago was to power off the computer, connect a CD-ROM drive, and pop in a bootable CD. Wait for the CD to spin up and then power on the Mac. The bootable CD doesn't need to be able to boot your machine. The trick is to boot from a floppy or even the internal hard drive and then eject the CD. Since the driver for the CD-Drive was loaded from the CD, you can now put a non-bootable CD in with your "Net Install" folders or "CD-Install 7.5.3" and install from there. Of course when you restart, the CD-Driver is lost and you either need to the driver in the system (which 7.5.3 has) or use the bootable CD trick each time.

I notice Apple no longer offers CD-ROM Setup v5.3.2 (a complete installer). The other trick is that the CD-ROM extension from 7.6 (extension v5.3.1) will work with third party SCSI CD-Rom drives (a throw-back to the Mac-Clone era).

Pardon my long post

Another trick would be to get an external SCSI HD and connect it to an OS 9 Mac. Installing 7.5.5 (you can use Wish I Were to set your gestalt ID to an SE-30 if you'd like) to the drive would let you boot the SE30 and then copy everything over to the internal HD. You could also put the SE30's HD in a SCSI Mac and go from there. Heck, even from OS X, you could simply copy an install disk set to the drive and boot it that way.

I have an external USB floppy for my MBP, and have no problem imaging 1.4MB diskettes for use in my IIcx.

What it *won't* do is image an 800KB diskette, but since you have an SE/30, that's not an issue.

Convert Se Data For Use On Mac Pro

Hi,

I am trying to find out if there is ANY WAY to convert some old 3.5 floppies which were created on an Apple Mac SE (c 89) in order to recover some 'archival' files?

I do have a USB 3.5 floppy drive, but when I insert an old floppy nothing happens.

Any suggestions as to how to recover the data on these old disks? Is there a software program or driver I can use?

Thanks

Mac

kimrick49 said:

Hi,

I am trying to find out if there is ANY WAY to convert some old 3.5 floppies which were created on an Apple Mac SE (c 89) in order to recover some 'archival' files?

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Not with modern hardware if they're 800kb (DD vs. HD).

I do have a USB 3.5 floppy drive, but when I insert an old floppy nothing happens.

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Correct; a USB drive won't read the disks written by variable-speed drives (the 800kb variety).

Any suggestions as to how to recover the data on these old disks? Is there a software program or driver I can use?

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Some options are discussed in this thread:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/464136/

Hi, i was unsuccessfull to make a boot floppy for my se/30. Don't work under macosx, classic, even with a g3 imac with macos9 because my external usb floppy drive don't work with disk copy.
But i found this article on Low End Mac who explain how to make a bootable floppy disk from a image disk under Mac OS X with the terminal and the "dd" command. It's very easy and it's working great
Now i just have to find a working scsi drive...

raphdjp said:

But i found this article on Low End Mac who explain how to make a bootable floppy disk from a image disk under Mac OS X with the terminal and the "dd" command. It's very easy and it's working great

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Just what I've been looking for myself! Thanks for the link...