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Ih8reno

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 10, 2012
1,383
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Hi everyone

A friend of mine has a Macintosh 7100 I believe running system 7. He is trying to get info off of it and put it on his Macbook Pro. Connected is an adapter which allows the Macintosh to run off of ethernet. The Macbook however does not see the Macintosh when it's connected. Is there anything we can do to make them compatible to transfer the info?
 
Depending on how much data you need to move, I'd suggest one of the following:

1. Get a USB floppy drive for the MBP, and use floppies to transport the data between the two.

2. Get an external SCSI ZIP drive for the 7100 and a USB ZIP drive for the MBP. Do the same as above.

My 7100 came with a 500mb hard drive-in the worst case, it would take about 5 ZIP transfers to copy the entire drive. I'm guessing he doesn't want everything(i.e. system files) so you should be okay.

Of course, if he just wants a few documents at a few KB each, the floppy option will work fine. If you're talking even 25mb of stuff, I'd suggest the ZIP option.
 
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+1 to bunnspecial's recommendations.

The only other alternative I could think of would be to set up an ftp server on the MacBook and use something like Fetch(?).
 
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Problem is he has tried using floppies and they never seem to work. It asks him to format them, he does and then it says there is an error. I'm going to try and find more 800k floppies but was hoping there was a way to use the ethernet.
 
NetPresenz might be your best bet. Running an ftp server on the 7100 would allow you to get stuff from it with a web browser on the MacBook.

http://main.system7today.com/software/netpresenz.html

Of course, this will depend on two things.

Getting the TCP/IP stack onto your System7 - it may already have it, or it may not. Look for a TCP/IP control panel or a "Network" control panel.

Which System 7 is it? 7.1.x, 7.5.x, 7.6.x ?

And getting NetPresenz onto the 7100 (as well as Stuffit Expander and DropStuff to compress and decompress archives that you can reliably transfer over FTP).

A USB floppy drive can only read & write 1.44MB floppies. If your 7100 can't format them, it's either not detecting a HD disk (1.44MB) and is creating DD Disks (800K) or it's heads are very dirty OR the mechanism is slightly seized and not allowing the heads to 'sandwich' the disk properly. It could also be attempting to read a 1.44Mb disk as if it were an 800K - failing, and then asking if you want to format it.

So, fixing the floppy seems paramount, either way, UNLESS you already have all the software required on the 7100
 
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