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Installing OS on a Quadra 700

H

hbsoftware

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 22, 2024
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I honestly dont know if this thread belongs here, i googled and this machine has a motorola cpu but i couldnt find an appropriate section on this forum.... anyway this is a quadra 700 that i saved from the scrapyard along with a pallet of other macs and pcs...unfortunately they did not allow me to bring the hard disks because of "data privacy".. i have a mac scsi hard drive, i think its 80mb , but because i had no mac at the time, to fit it, i formatted it to fat32 on an old pc with scsi card... I dont have any macs with internet connection. I have a se30 that boots , and some g3 macs. Maybe i can download a hard drive image and clone that into the old scsi drive , fit it in the quadra and voila?? What would be the easiest way???
 

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This is the hard drive... oh and other question i have, how do i eject the floppy disk? And do these drives need the replacement gears like the ones in the se/30?
 
Honestly, I'm not sure there's actually a way to write a Mac disk image to a PC drive. Not without using some version of the Mac OS, anyway. It might be possible if you ran some version in a virtual machine and gave it direct access to the physical drive? But that's a wildly overengineered solution. The better play is to get your hands on a compatible SCSI CD ROM drive. No, it can't use it while closed, but SCSI was very much designed for daisy chaining drives, and you can always just use that temporarily to get it up and running.

Unless one of those G3 Macs you have is beige, you'd need to find a SCSI card to write a disk image to it. And even then, you're working with a 68k Mac, not a PPC Mac, honestly I'd just recommend setting up the drive from scratch. I want to say it can run OS 8.1, but you'd probably be better off with 7.5/7.6, mostly because they're less demanding.

Also, a quick check says the Quadra uses AAUI for ethernet, which it looks like you can just buy fairly cheap adaptors over on ebay to get proper modern ethernet, and considering you do have G3 Macs, you already have the perfect bridge systems. Just pop the SCSI drive in there, get floppies set up to install your OS, and I'm pretty sure you should be able to set networking up with the likes of 10.4 right out of the box. It'd be cheaper and you could constantly add more things to the Quadra without needing to take it apart every time you want to add something to it.
 
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Thanks for all the ideas! I have read online that i can write floppy images using regular 1.44mb drive on a pc using winimage software, and use them to install macOS 7. Has anyone done it? Ive used winimage a lot but never to write mac disks. Meanwhile i opened the diskette drive and found the dreaded broken gear and already ordered a replacement on ebay. The PSU is funky and doesnt turn on from cold, needs to be powered for a while and requires multiple tries... its an astec unit...i opened it and all the lytic caps tested perfect with excepcion of the 2 smaller form factor ones,one was very bad and the other was marginally lossy.. they are 4.7 at 50v. I also ordered all the caps anyway. The safety rifa caps i already replaced with x y caps i had laying around, they are the modern type that doesnt fail
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Amethyst1 said:
If it's an uncompressed, sector-level ("raw") disk image that inclues the partition table and everything, writing it directly to a drive using e.g. dd on Linux should work.
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Thats what i was thinking, a sector to sector type cloning.. i am a bit worried to open my se-30 though...sometimes we mess with stuff and it stops working ...it is all recapped though... now i am considering using floppies made with winimage..i read that it should work with floppies made on a pc...
 
hbsoftware said:
Thats what i was thinking, a sector to sector type cloning.. i am a bit worried to open my se-30 though...sometimes we mess with stuff and it stops working ...it is all recapped though... now i am considering using floppies made with winimage..i read that it should work with floppies made on a pc...
Click to expand...

Or you can write "Read, write, and format Apple Macintosh 1.44MB HD HFS format (1.44MB)" disks with a Windows computer using Omniflop. Whenever I wanted to download images of Atari ST games and play them on a real machine, that's what I always used to create the disks with 100% success.

 
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Now, I haven't actually worked on a (non-emulated) late 68k Mac in 20 years, but there are plenty of OS 7.5 floppy images out there. So it should be very easy to at least get enough of an operating system onto the thing to get it on a network, and then it would be a lot more trivial to just install whatever else you wanted, as the likes of Toast can just mount CD ROM images. You might need to update to a point release to get Toast working, but you should be able to install just about anything at that point, as long as the Mac has enough ram.

Oh, and 68k Macs don't support HFS+ for boot drives. OS 8.1 gives support for HFS+ to non-boot drives, but that's it. Most tools out there for working with Mac formatted drives on PC seem to be for HFS+, not HFS, which can make working with them a little trickier. On the other hand, OSX had full read/write support for HFS until 10.6, which makes one of your G3 Macs perfect for working on anything involving the Quadra.
 
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Ok so i got hold of floppy images of os7.0.1 and wrote them on my xp computer. The mac happily boots from them... but if i try the first install disk it cant see my hard drive and i cannot install...if i try the disk tools floppy it gives me this error. Maybe because the hard drive i am using is msdos formatted? Its an apple drive but i had no apple machines at the time so i formatted it in a pc....
 

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I have a feeling that the install disk boots straight into Installer rather than Finder, but if I'm wrong...

Select the install disk and press Cmd-E to eject it. Insert Disk Tools. Run "Apple HD SC Setup" and see whether it can see the drive.

Otherwise, have you tried holding Shift to disable extensions?
 
Nermal said:
I have a feeling that the install disk boots straight into Installer rather than Finder, but if I'm wrong...

Select the install disk and press Cmd-E to eject it. Insert Disk Tools. Run "Apple HD SC Setup" and see whether it can see the drive.

Otherwise, have you tried holding Shift to disable extensions?
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Yes install disk boots straight to installer...with extensions disabled the same error appears. As far as selecting the install disk and ejecting it, i didnt quite understood how to do it, can you be a bit more specific? Sorry i am a bit of a mac noob. Thanks for your time
 
Another idea that i had...i have some mac g3's..can i connect the old scsi drive to the mac g3 and format it there? Some kind of scsi adapter from the more modern scsi plug to the old style rectangular, ide-style scsi plug??
 
hbsoftware said:
Another idea that i had...i have some mac g3's..can i connect the old scsi drive to the mac g3 and format it there? Some kind of scsi adapter from the more modern scsi plug to the old style rectangular, ide-style scsi plug??
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That won't work without a SCSI card. Unless it's beige, G3 Macs use exclusively IDE, not SCSI.
 
repairedCheese said:
That won't work without a SCSI card. Unless it's beige, G3 Macs use exclusively IDE, not SCSI.
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My g3's have ide disks but i have macintosh scsi cards for them, but the connector is more modern than the rectagular 50 pin of the old hard drive i want to fit on the quadra... i have scsi cards with the old style connector but they are for pc
 
Certificate of Excellence said:
Something like SCSI2SD or BlueSCSI are replacement solutions for aging scsi drives.
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Yes i heard about that...but i dont really want to go that route...the hard drive i have is period correct and works 100% ...if i have to buy anything id rather buy another drive with macOS already installed but that just sounds silly because this is just a software issue, all the hardware is fine, atleast the drive is 100%, im sure
 
repairedCheese said:
Honestly, I'm not sure there's actually a way to write a Mac disk image to a PC drive.
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Yeah, that's a tough cookie. ;)
@hbsoftware - if you happen to have an image of working system, containing boot sectors, drivers and so on (iso or Toast), try this utility:

iBored

apps.tempel.org apps.tempel.org
You may also try to clone bootable OS 7.5-7.6.x CD image to the SCSI drive in a similar way and see what happens.
Good luck!
 
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I've found a few references of "bus error" potentially being caused by bad RAM. Try removing or reseating some of it.

It might also be worth disconnecting the hard drive and seeing whether the Disk Tools floppy will boot without a drive. Also, given that it's SCSI, check for termination issues.
 
hbsoftware said:
My g3's have ide disks but i have macintosh scsi cards for them, but the connector is more modern than the rectagular 50 pin of the old hard drive i want to fit on the quadra... i have scsi cards with the old style connector but they are for pc
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What Mac cards do you have? Adaptec or ATTO? All SCSI cards have internal connectors. Mount your SCSI drive temporarily inside the G3, connect power, SCSI cable, format the drive (HFS) and try to install some early OS to it.
 
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ojfd said:
What Mac cards do you have? Adaptec or ATTO? All SCSI cards have internal connectors. Mount your SCSI drive temporarily inside the G3, connect power, SCSI cable, format the drive (HFS) and try to install some early OS to it.
Click to expand...
HI
adaptec aha2940u2b
the internal connector doesnt fit my old hard drive (ibm wds3168c1)
are there any adapters?
 
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