Q: How To Install A OS On A Powerbook 5300

There is a downloadable System 7.5.3 (e.g. the British English version here) that will work. The individual files will fit onto 1.44 MB floppies.

However, the PowerBook 5300 must be bootable before you can carry out the installation. Also, you have to have a way of decoding the MacBinary (.bin). So, first a couple of questions:

a) Is there an operating system on the PB 5300's hard disk now? If so, which?

b) Do you have access to a bootable floppy (such as a Disk Tools disk) for this very machine?

c) How do you download files? Through another Mac? If so, which model/OS? Via a PC?

d) Do you have StuffIt Expander for Macintosh (version 4.0.1 or 5.5)?

Jan

Hello,

a) The Powerbook Does Not Have A OS At The Moment.

Would it then be correct to assume that the startup sound is heard, followed by a flashing disk icon with a question-mark? To rule out anything else, you could try to reset the
Power Manager and the PRAM to begin with.

b) Im Not Sure About The Bootable Floppy But Im Assuming I Don't Have One.

Let us concentrate on getting a bootable disk first. If you had access to another semi-old Macintosh computer with a built-in floppy drive, this would have been easy. A floppy made from the Disk Tools PPC download here (disregard the other files) will boot the PB 5300. With an older Mac, and System 7.5 or higher, one would use Disk Copy 6.3.3 (the Make a Floppy command in the Utilities menu) to create a sector-copied floppy disk from the disk image. Do you have an external USB floppy drive? I do not know whether a Mac OS X disk utility is capable of producing an appropriate floppy. Could you somehow run Disk Copy 6.3.3 (under Classic, or on a machine with Mac OS 8.6 to 9.x)?

c) I Download Through This iMac Intel Running OSX Leopard And My Old G3 iMac Running Panther

See above regarding the floppy drive.

d) I Have A Version Of Stuffit Expander But Its 11

That should be fine for decoding on a modern Mac. Sometimes, one would prefer to keep the .bin as it is even when downloading on a Mac OS X computer, and carry out the decoding in StuffIt Expander on the target machine (the PB 5300 here). Once a bootable floppy has been made, we will find a way to handle this ( StuffIt Expander 5.5 can be found at ftp://ftp.allume.com/pub/archive/mac/StuffIt_Expander ).

Jan

Correction

The Disk Tools PPC can be found here.

See also KB article # 58560 about using Disk Copy (6.3.3) with USB floppy drives.

Jan

Hi.

I have the same problem with my PowerBook 5300 but I don´t have a Mac system, only my PC (with a floppy drive). Is there any Disk Copy alternative for Windows or Linux?

Hello,

The old Disk Copy 4.2 disk image format can be handled by a PC program (such as the shareware application WinImage). One would then begin by using StuffIt Expander (Aladdin Expander) for Windows (ftp://ftp.allume.com/pub/archive/pc/StuffIt_Expander/) to decode MacBinary (.bin) and decompress StuffIt (.sea or .sit) on the PC in order to gain access to the disk image itself.

Normally, one would never decode/decompress a Mac application file on a PC. The encoding is there to protect the Mac files (which consist of two parts).

The problem in your case is that another disk image format (NDIF) is used in the Disk Tools PPC download above. As far as I know, this format is not compatible with PC disk image utilities. Part of the reason seems to be that an NDIF disk image can include compression.

Locating a bootable floppy (suitable for the PB 5300) download in the DC 4.2 format is not easy. Merely as an example, the At Ease-IDE Utility Disk here appears to be something like that.

Once you have a working startup floppy, the rest is rather easy. The system folder of a startup floppy can, usually, be drag-copied to a hard disk; this will provide you with a temporary operating system (thus making the floppy drive free for subsequent file transfers). A full System 7.5.3 is available for download from Apple. You can use a Mac disk utility for PC (e.g. the shareware program TransMac or perhaps an old freeware application called HFVExplorer) to transfer the individual files on Mac-formatted 1.44 MB diskettes to the PB 5300 hard disk.

Jan