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Power Macintosh 8600 no HDD, how to get it running MAC OS 7.6?

tevion5

tevion5

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 12, 2011
1,967
1,603
Ireland
I recently bought a power mac 8600 but it came with no hard drive. I have a spare 4GB IDE drive lying about but I need help:

1. Getting a copy of system 7.6 on a disc to make a new install

2. Will that installation wizard be capable of formatting the drive to HFS? (or whatever)

3. Any other instructions for getting this thing up and running?
 
Have any other similar era Macs?
You can copy the contents of an ISO or even a minimalist boot disk to an HFS formatted drive, and boot that from there, install the rest.

IOW: If you have floppy or CD images for the install, and a way to format that hard drive somewhere else, you could copy the entire contents of the CD or boot floppy image to the drive and then complete the install after booting it.

As mentioned, it needs to be HFS, not HFS Plus.
 
Intell said:
7.6 will be able to format that drive to HFS, but not HFS+. It has no support for HFS+.
Click to expand...

HFS should be fine. I am using this a machine to allow me to write software to 800k disks for my 512Ke. If I get a copy of the system 7 cd in ISO format on my PowerMac g5 let's say and burn that to any old cd, can I then load it into the 8600 and format an empty drive during installation like OS 10.8 or windows 7?

Please point out any flaws in this plan! :)

----------
tdiaz said:
Have any other similar era Macs?
You can copy the contents of an ISO or even a minimalist boot disk to an HFS formatted drive, and boot that from there, install the rest.

IOW: If you have floppy or CD images for the install, and a way to format that hard drive somewhere else, you could copy the entire contents of the CD or boot floppy image to the drive and then complete the install after booting it.

As mentioned, it needs to be HFS, not HFS Plus.
Click to expand...

All I got older is my 512Ke and closest newer is my PowerMac G5 I'm afraid. Im mainly getting this thing just so I can get software over to me 512Ke from the Internet.
 
7.5

I'm pretty sure you will need OS 7.5 to allow MFS for the 512 rather HFS 7.6 and up supports only. My color classic makes good 400 and 800k floppies but my 7.6 machines won't make a good disk for them.
 
You can write to MFS volumes with 7.6, with 7.6.1 MFS support is read only.
MacOS 8 is the first to not support MFS at all.

However .. if you're writing disk images, you can do that. If the disk image writing software tries to mount the disk afterwards in OS 8 or higher, it will give the MFS disks can't be read dialog and spit it out.

I also use the Apple IIgs to make images and copy 400K disks. It can't mount them, but several disk copy utilities will copy them and the various image making utilities will recognize the disk.
 
I just noticed your first post said you had a 4gb IDE hard drive... just FYI the 8600 only has SCSI internal ports...no IDE.
 
Good news guys, there previous owner never tested it and didnt spot the 4GB scsi HDD sitting at the top of the case (odd for a hdd)!

So when I plugghed it in to test it, praying the untested mac from ebay would even start at all, I was surprsingly greated to the Mac OS 9 welcome screen! :D

Works great, got Sid Meir's Pirates running on my 512Ke through 800K floppy transfer!
 
tevion5 said:
That's a good idea. Machine has no USB ports or DVD drive though. Might consider getting an old PCI USB card, shouldn't cost much.
Click to expand...

Make sure you get one that is compatiable with your OS. I know that OS 7.6 does not work with USB at all. I think it wasn't until 8.5 that USB drives were supported with a driver update. OS 9 does have native support for them.
 
No USB or DVD, but you said the machine does have Toast .. and it does have a network connection. :)

Save as Image .. burn elsewhere. :)
 
You'll only get USB working on MacOS 8.6 or later.

If you're going to get a USB PCI card, make sure you get one with an "OptiFireLink" USB 1 chipset 82c861.

In my experience, USB 2.0 cards tend to be flaky at best with the original drivers, and will only perform at USB 1 speeds anyway.

USB 2.0 cards in machines that already have USB ports on the motherboard work fine as USB 1 cards under classic MacOS but we had great difficulty getting generic NEC USB 2 cards to work reliably.

If you intend to use MacOS 8.6 may also need to get Apple's USB PCI Card installer (OS 9.1 should include this already):

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1238
 
Intell said:
Make sure you get one that is compatiable with your OS. I know that OS 7.6 does not work with USB at all. I think it wasn't until 8.5 that USB drives were supported with a driver update. OS 9 does have native support for them.
Click to expand...

It's running OS 9.1 so I believe USB should be no issue. :)
 
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