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Mac Plus boot disk

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David_M

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Joined
Oct 1, 2016
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647
Location
Melbourne, Australia
I just picked up a Mac plus (M0001a) with keyboard and mouse for $20 at a recycler.

It had intermittent video due to a cable on the analog board needing reseating, while I had it open I checked the caps in the analog board and the electrolytics all look good but the rifa caps needed replacing due to cracking.

I currently have access to a clients SCSI drive and the system will boot fine from that, it doesnt seem to have any way to create a boot floppy installed on the hard drive but I can make blank formatted disks.
I have one floppy that contains a tour demo program that will boot the machine but the program it attempts to run after booting hangs the machine.

All attempts to create a bootable floppy on a PC have failed, the Mac wont read images created on the PC and the PC wont read disks formatted in the mac (using transmac).
At this stage I don't know if its a compatibility issue or a drive alignment issue. I've tried multiple PC's using DOS, Windows and Linux.

Can anyone in Melbourne help me with a bootable 800k floppy?
 
The Macintosh uses variable-speed floppy drives in order to achieve a storage capacity of 800KB. Your PC floppy drive is probably fixed-speed and cannot create 800K floppy disks. It can probably create 720KB floppy disks, unless it's USB-based which supports only 1.44MB.

Only later Macintosh floppy drives support 720K/1.44MB PC floppy disks (with appropriate software such as System 7.5.5). Older floppy drives can only read/write 400K/800K floppy disks.

If you can boot from the SCSI drive and the floppy drive is working well, just initialize (e.g. format) a new 400K/800K floppy disk on the Plus and drag the System folder over, 'blessing' (marking as bootable) the folder if necessary. This will make the disk bootable. The process is actually simpler and more intuitive compared with MS-DOS's SYS command :)
 
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Assume I know next to nothing about using a Mac. My knowledge is mostly limited to repairing them.

The system folder on the hard drive is around 5MB, so no way to put it on the 800k floppy. The system fil inside the folder is 2MB alone.
I had limited success using the SE Tour disk, its system file is smaller and will fit on the floppy but is a custom version. If I copy the system folder from that floppy and finder from the hard drive so I can mark it as the startup app, it attempts to boot but gets an error.
 
You can indeed make 800K and 1.4MB floppies on a PC, but you'll need special software to do it. You can use the demo version of TransMac for 15 days. That should be enough time for you to make a disk set. Likewise, you can do it on any Mac using the Terminal (at least, you used to be able to.)

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/how-to-generate-floppy-disks-for-old-macintosh-computers/

Apple used to have older System disks available for free. They're mirrored all over the place, so it shouldn't be hard to find a System 6 disk set. You can then create some disks using your Mac or PC.
 
olePigeon said:
You can indeed make 800K and 1.4MB floppies on a PC, but you'll need special software to do it. You can use the demo version of TransMac for 15 days. That should be enough time for you to make a disk set. Likewise, you can do it on any Mac using the Terminal (at least, you used to be able to.)

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/how-to-generate-floppy-disks-for-old-macintosh-computers/

Apple used to have older System disks available for free. They're mirrored all over the place, so it shouldn't be hard to find a System 6 disk set. You can then create some disks using your Mac or PC.
Click to expand...

Tried transmac and it doesnt work with the usb floppy on my main PC, but I'll setup one of my tweeners and try it on a regular floppy drive
 
Uh, no software-only solution will enable a PC to read or write Macintosh 400k/800k floppy disks.

The solution described in the link above requires an intermediate Macintosh that has an 800k/1.44mb Superdrive.

The only current, readily available way that I know of to write a Macintosh 400/800k disk directly from a PC is with the use of a Kryoflux - and even then, that is tricky.
 
SomeGuy said:
Uh, no software-only solution will enable a PC to read or write Macintosh 400k/800k floppy disks.

The solution described in the link above requires an intermediate Macintosh that has an 800k/1.44mb Superdrive.

The only current, readily available way that I know of to write a Macintosh 400/800k disk directly from a PC is with the use of a Kryoflux - and even then, that is tricky.
Click to expand...

I think you are right ,none of the tweeners work. Transmac doesxnt even show the floppy drives in the drive list.

So back to square one. Can anyone in Melbourne makes me a set of OS disks for a Mac Plus?
 
Oh, sorry about the misinformation. I misread that article.

If you don't have nay luck here, I'd recommend 68kmla.org. I know there're at least 2 Aussies over there.
 
I'm getting a little closer.

I have the use of a bootable external SCSI drive however its system file is too large to transfer to a floppy and the system, folder is missing anything useful other than finder and control panel.
I am able to copy files onto the hard drive if I plug it into a linux machine.
I'm trying to get "Disk Copy 4.2" onto the hard drive in a form that can be ran as an app.
To that end I've installed Aladdin expander on my windows machine and unpacked the file "Disk Copy 4.2.sea" ... I've put that on the SCSI drive and marked it as an App using the linux tool hattrib. It can't be run on the Mac.
I've unpacked 'Stuffit expander" transferred the resulting file "StuffIt Expanderª 401 Installer", marked it as an app and it will not run either.

Can any Mac user tell me what files I need to transfer onto the SCSI drive to unpack and run 'Disk Copy_4.2.sea.bin" and is there a way to mark a file and executable on the Mac using finder?
 
Success!

I ended up finding an emulator that had all the tools needed installed on one of its virtual hard drive images.

1. Use linux and dd to create an image of the SCSI hard drive
2. Copy that image over the lan and mount the image in the emulator
3. Copy the needed utilities from the emulators image file to my image file.
4. Copy the new image file back over the lan to linux
5. dd the new image overwriting the SCSI drive
6. Mount the drive and copy the floppy image files from the internet onto the drive.
7. Put the drive back into external case and boot the Mac from it
8. Use stuffit to unpack the files on the mac and disk copy to write the image.

End result aside from the hair loss... a working set of system disks
 
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