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Pre-install LCIII

P

Psychou

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 11, 2014
6
0
Hello world!
Apple is whole new world to me!
I am a Windows system administrator (yes i know that sounds like a joke for most of you :D ) and now i am proud owner of lc III.
That's mine second time in my life touching MAC. The problem is that the OS language is Greek :D .
The pizza box has only a floppy. So could someone help me in the pre-installing adventure?

The first questions are:
1. Is it set to boot from the floppy?
1.1. If no- how to enter BIOS :D?
2. Is the OS bigger than one diskette?
3. Is the diskette needs to be bootable?
4. From where can i download the OS?
5. Which OS should i use?

P.S. 1. Can I change the HDD with a bigger one and, if yes, is it going to recognize HDD bigger than 160 MB?

I apologize for my bad and rusty English!

Best Regards!
 
The system should try to boot from the disk drive automatically, so no worries there. There is no BIOS on these machines.

Do you have a PC with a floppy drive? It's relatively easy to make a bootable set of install disks with WinImage and I can provide instructions and a download link if you have a drive.
 
Yep. I am surrounded by all kinds of computer technics. :)

Thanks in advance!
 
Oops, I was going to give you System 7.0.1 but it won't actually run on an LC III. Umm... I'd better let someone else field this one because things can get a bit messy with "enablers" etc if you get the wrong version.
 
Ok. :cool: I am sorry for the wrong section.

OFFTOPIC: Can someone provide me a good apple book or something like "apple for dummies"

Thank you, Nermal!

EDIT: I found a book :) I am sorry for the spam..

Any help is needed :) !
 
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There were two motherboard revisions for the LCIII

One is 25Mhz, the other is 33Mhz. The problem arises with what Nermal already mentioned - Enablers.

You can think of Enablers as additional resources (drivers if you like) to recognize new hardware features in models released after "reference versions" of the operating systems.

System 7.1 became a mess of "enablers" since many new hardware changes were introduced during 7.1's lifetime.

Apple has never released 7.1 and all the various enabler installs publicly.

7.1 generally had 5 floppies. Install, Install 2, Tidbits, Printing, Fonts

When new machines were introduced, an "Install Me First" disk was added, containing additional resources and the required enabler file.

Your next choice might be System 7.5, which Apple publicly released for free as 7.5.3. This won't require any enablers but is quite a few more disks, 19 in fact.

Scroll down to "Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.5_Version_7.5.3/System_7.5.3_xxof19.smi.bin" to see all the parts here:

http://www.info.apple.com/support/oldersoftwarelist.html#system

These parts must be decompressed from the .bin to a .smi (for part 01) and to a .part for the rest.

If you're able to read & write to the Mac HFS (Hierarchical File System) hard drive on a windows system without reformatting it, you could put all the de-compressed 7.5.3 "parts" onto the HD, then boot with the 7.5 Network Access floppy and run the installer from the System_7.5.3_01of19.smi file

Get the 7.5 Network Access floppy disk image here:
http://download.info.apple.com/Appl...osh/Utilities/Network_Access_Disk_7.5.sea.bin

NOTE: the biggest problem is decompressing the disk images. Apple's older systems used a file system containing data-forks and resource-forks. Systems such as Windows will not decompress these files correctly. Since the 7.5.3 disk is a SMI (Self Mounting disk Image) it is essentially a MacOS application and requires both data & resource forks to be intact. I'm not sure if Suffit Expander for Windows would be able to write these on a Mac HFS volume when mounted in a Windows environment. Stuffit Expander was originally "the" de-compression program for older Mac systems.

Sorry for the long post. This doesn't yet get into ALL the detail you may need to know, but it gives you a starting point and some keywords to throw at google. ;)
 
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MacTech68 said:
but it gives you a starting point and some keywords to throw at google. ;)
Click to expand...

Hahahahahah exactly.
Now I have what to read after work. Thanks a lot. I will write again after when i fully understand your post. I got the idea. I will attach the hdd. I have a linux, too :D.

Thanks again!
Just wondering is this system capable of recognizing more then 160 mb hard disk drive? Or nobody knows for sure? :cool:
 
Psychou said:
...Just wondering is this system capable of recognizing more then 160 mb hard disk drive? Or nobody knows for sure? :cool:
Click to expand...

Ok, The theory is this (from http://support.apple.com/kb/TA27115 )

A volume is either a full disk, or a section of a disk, partitioned into separate parts. If you partition a single drive then each partition is considered a volume.

* The maximum volume size under System 6 and System 7 is 2 GB. System 7.5 increased that limit to 4 GB and System 7.5.2 (and later) increases that limit to 2 TB on some computers, including:

-
any computer that came with System 7.5.2 or newer.
-
any Macintosh computer with PCI slots.

* The maximum number of volumes is theoretically limited to 173 due to the maximum number of open files in the Mac OS. Since there are other files that are opened when the computer boots up, the actual maximum will vary depending upon how many other files are open by the operating system.
* The maximum file size is 2 GB.
* The maximum number of files on a volume is 65,536.
* The maximum number of files in a folder is 32,767.
* The maximum size of the data fork in a file is 2 GB.
* The maximum size of the resource fork in a file is 16 megabytes.
Click to expand...

So on your machine, 7.5.3 will support a volume size up to 4GB. However, drives that aren't 'Apple Badged' ( ie, say a Quantum drive with an Apple logo on the label), will not format with Apple's "HDSC Setup" which is the formatting program. There are/were third party utilities available, but you need to boot from another source to use them - difficult with a floppy.

The other thing to take into account is the minimum block size. With HFS (or HFS Standard as it became known) the block size increases with drive capacity - since the addresses are limited. HFS Plus (shipped with MacOS 8.1 or later) overcomes this problem. The point is that on a 4GB drive, an empty text file will occupy about 64K of space. MacOS 8.1 isn't going to perform all that well on an LC III. :(

Examples of an "Apple Badged" drive:
http://www.google.com/search?site=imghp&tbm=isch&q=Apple+quantum+drive
 
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All right. First- thank you people! :D
Second- So.. I can't attach the hard disk, because it's SCSI IDC 50.. A damn big data transfer cable. I was amazed when i saw it. :D All pcs in my entire life were/are :) with Parallel ATA and SATA.
The motherboard is with a STATIC MOUNTED Motorola mc68030fe25b CPU :eek: 25 mhz.
Its with EDU ram. The only thing which i am able to recognize :p .
I am attaching a photo of the motherboard...
I am just curious why the eprom (in blue) is missing , i believe that the red slot is for LAN card, but the green slot is for what? It's not the same as the ram slot.. However...
Now I have a 80 MB hdd and if install 7.6.1 (with the 25 disks) i will probably have 40 MB free :p.
Mine working day is starting now.
Tomorrow I'll have more free time to read.
Thank again and best regards!
 

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Ok, the RAM is 72Pin SIMM and the machine is capable of taking a maximum 32MB SIMM. Looking at yours, you've got 16 Hitachi chips, 5 volt, 16M (4x4M), 2K refresh, Fast Page Mode (FPM) at 60nano seconds (60ns). Since there's 16 chips, this should already be a 32MB SIMM - lucky you!

This is FPM RAM, unlike the 72Pin RAM used on PCs which is usually Extended Data Output (EDO). Most Macs don't use parity SIMMs, so only 16 chips are present.

Your blue IC is actually a Floating Point Co-Processor (FPU) for speeding up math calculations. It's an optional extra and isn't required. For reference it's a 68882 in a PLCC package type. Note that it should be a 25Mhz version to match your CPU clock speed.

The red slot is indeed for an Ethernet card, but it can do more than that. It's referred to as a Processor Direct Slot (or PDS). Kind of like an ISA or PCI slot.

The green slot is for additional Video RAM. Rather unique to the Macs. It allows the addidtion of a 68Pin 256K of VRAM for a total of 768K Video RAM.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA29136?viewlocale=en_US
 
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I was sure that the ram is EDO (sorry for mine mistake). However, how I sad- mine mistake. So MacTech68, thank you very much for this MAC lesson! This is new and interesting for me.
Today I came up with the brilliant idea- can I install a mac OS as a virtual machine to use it for decompressing the disk images ? And now I have Mac Snow Leopard 10.6.6. It crashes from time to time, but it is fine if am not switching in windows. Tomorrow I'll try downloading 7.5.3 and decompressing it. For now that's all from me.
Thaks again for wasting your time!

I am sorry for my bad English skills!
 
Yes, a virtual machine would do it, provided you can then write Mac floppies from it since the files won't survive a different file system like NTFS etc.

No problem with your English. I seen much worse by those who are supposed to speak it natively ! ;)
 
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