Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Macintosh SE

Vader

Vader

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Oct 11, 2004
1,211
1
Saint Charles, MO
I tried to search for this, but had no luck since the forum search would not use the "SE" part.

Anyway, I bought this Macintosh SE at a garage sale for $5. It has a bad OS I think.
When I boot it, it has the welcome to macintosh screen, and then it gets a bomb, with a system error.
* Sorry a system error occurred.
* "System"
* address error
* To temporarily turn off extensions, restart and
* hold down the shift key.

I hold down the shift key and restart and the welcome to macintosh screen says extensions off, but then I get the same bomb again.

Does this mean that the computer has a hardware problem, or I just need to find an OS 6.03 install disc and boot from that (can old macs do that?) and reinstall.
I believe this is just the original Macintosh SE, this one, but I don't have specs on it, since I can't actually boot it.
M# is M5010.
 
I found that my dad had a macally usb floppy drive, so I started on a search for a 800k disk. I noticed that with all the old disks are tried, the drive didn't even try to read them. Then I looked up the drive online, to find that it says it supports 1.4 mb disks, so that must mean it doesn't support 800k disks.

So how can I make a disk with OS 6 on it, so I can boot this mac?
 
The SE has a SCSI port, and can boot from an external HD.

Problem with System 6 is that you can't easily create a bootable System 6 disk (floppy or HD) unless you've got a machine that can boot OS 9 or earlier. Even with operating systems between System 7 and MacOS 9, you need to download "FixSix" and drag-n-drop the System 6 System folder onto it because boot blocks worked differently under System 6 (or something of the sort, I think it was the boot blocks).

On the other hand, the SE will boot System 7 :)

I would buy up a cheap external SCSI HD and install System 7 on it. I think you can run the System 7 installer in the Classic environment using the "Install for any computer" option. System 7.0.1 is a good OS for this computer. It is available from the various classic-mac websites as a series of disk images.
 
I wonder, if I took out the hd, could I put it in my external hd enclosure and put os 6 or 7 on it that way? I am sure my enclosure wouldn't work (right?), so I wonder if maybe I would need to purchase one.
 
CanadaRAM said:
It's a SCSI drive, so you would need a SCSI enclosure (and a Mac that had a SCSI port).

It's for moments like these that I keep a beige G3 machine around. SCSI, IDE, Floppy, CDRW, PCI slots, boots 9 or X -- it'll cover anything ;)
Click to expand...
LOL, are you volunteering to make me some 800k 6.0.8 install discs?

I wish we had kept all our old macs. Then I would have no troubles now.
 
I have gotten that error a couple of times... once it was bad ram, and another time it was a hard drive controller card. id try the OS first, but don't rule out other possibliities.
 
Well, I was going to take it apart, but,
1. I took out the screws and then I didn't want to crack the case when it wouldn't come open
2. I don't have the proper equipment to work around the CRT discharge issue.

I will be posting here again once the disks come.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back