Need help with my M0001

[skiman26]

I have an original mac that I want to start playing around with.

Trouble is, a disc is stuck in the drive. When I turn the computer on, all you see is a picture of a disc with a '?' on it.

I tried unfolding a paper clip and sticking it into the release hole but it still won't come out.

Any ideas??

 

[David Schmidt]

Trouble is, a disc is stuck in the drive. When I turn the computer on, all you see is a picture of a disc with a '?' on it.

Are you sure there's a disk in there? Do you hear the drive labor to seat it, or to eject it before the question mark appears?

I tried unfolding a paper clip and sticking it into the release hole but it still won't come out.

Do you sense that you're moving the mechanism any? Is it lifting and dropping as you push the paperclip in and out? If a disk is really stuck in there, you might need to take the machine apart and clean/recondition the drive. They do get sticky and gummy after a (long) while.

This is a pretty nice resource for a disk drive teardown. Not exactly the same situation as your M0001, but you get the idea.

 

[skiman26]

Here is a picture of what I'm talking about.

http://www.cpi-symposiums.com/mac.html

I forgot to mention that the disc was all the way in the drive before I turned it on.

After 'thinking' for awhile when I turned it on, it tried to eject it.

This picture is the current position of the disc.

I feel like I am springing some sort of mechanism with the paper clip, but when I gently pull on the disc, it does not come out.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

The metal shutter is probably bent, and now stuck. Short of dismantling the system, you can try putting the floppy back in, then use long tweezers to reach in and clamp the shutter flat as the disk ejects.

Or, if you don't mind the chance of causing damage to the system (hah!) you can just yank the disk out hard, and if the shutter stays inside the system, reach in with tweezers and pull it out. (It's not that hard to pull a broken shutter out of a floppy drive, but there is the chance that you could break the read/write head doing so; so you probably don't want to do it on an antique system with a difficult-to-find floppy drive.)

 

[skiman26]

Good news to know. So I am looking for a bent piece of metal holding the disc from ejecting all the way?

If and when I do get it out, I will need to track down a system disc. I thought the current disc was the system disc, but it obviously isn't.

Are they hard to find?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Good news to know. So I am looking for a bent piece of metal holding the disc from ejecting all the way?

If and when I do get it out, I will need to track down a system disc. I thought the current disc was the system disc, but it obviously isn't.

Are they hard to find?

Very. The original Macintosh (M0001) had a 400 kB, single-sided disk drive; and could only run very early Macintosh operating systems. The most common "old" Macintosh OSes (System 6 and System 7) will not run on that machine.

In order to get a functioning system disk, you would need a system capable of running System 7.6 or earlier, along with a 400 kB or 800 kB floppy disk to write the disk image to.

If you ask on 68kmla, someone would probably be willing to create a disk for you and send it for a small fee.

 

[skiman26]

I do have an external floppy drive, does that make any difference?

I probably can't boot from the external hard drive.

 

[David Schmidt]

I do have an external floppy drive, does that make any difference?

I probably can't boot from the external hard drive.

You certainly can boot from an external floppy drive. But which is it? Floppy or hard?

 

[skiman26]

oh really? Well that's nice, so i really wouldn't have to worry about taking that disc out at the moment?

Its just the 3.5" floppy disc drive

 

[Anonymous Freak]

oh really? Well that's nice, so i really wouldn't have to worry about taking that disc out at the moment?

Its just the 3.5" floppy disc drive

If it is the proper 400 kB (single-sided) floppy drive for this system, then yes, it is 100% bootable.

If it is a newer 800 kB or 1.4 MB (double-sided or high density) floppy drive, then it will not work with your system at all.

(Side note: Apple made a floppy-port hard drive (the "HD20") for the Macintosh 128-512, before the Plus got SCSI; but that hard drive is not bootable, as you need to load drivers before you can use it.)