Quade321
Level 1 (0 points)

Q: Macintosh Plus SCSI Problems

Hi, I've just dug up an old Macintosh Plus and I've been trying to get it to boot something. I don't have any of the original media unfortunately and no other classic Macs available to me with an 800k floppy. So, the cheapest solution I came up with was to connect a SCSI Drive to it and try to boot from that. However, I'm not that old and thus have never dealt with SCSI before, so I feel like I've probably done multiple things wrong and was curious exactly what.

 

The drive is an 8GB Quantum Atlas V

So, my attempt at getting the Macintosh Plus to boot from the SCSI drive is as follows.

I booted up System 6 in Mini vMac and I created a blank 524MB image using dd in Linux. I then mounted the blank image in Mini vMac and initialized it, then I copied the System Folder and the other utilities in the virtual machine's boot drive to the root of the image. I then used dd to write the image directly to the hard drive (sudo dd if=./image.dsk of=/dev/sdb). After that I powered off my computer to take the hard drive out and hooked it up to my Macintosh Plus with a DB-25 to 68-pin SCSI cable. I have no case for the hard drive so I powered it with an old PC power supply with molex. I powered the drive and turned on my Mac Plus and it doesn't seem it made any attempt to read it (no floppy with an X over it, just straight to question mark).

 

Any help would be appreciated as I'm not very familiar with SCSI and couldn't find much information on this on the Internet. Thank you.

Macintosh Plus, Mac OS 8.6 or Earlier

Posted on Dec 4, 2014 12:56 PM

Close
Quade321

Q: Macintosh Plus SCSI Problems

  • All replies
  • Helpful answers

  • by Jan Hedlund,

    Jan Hedlund Jan Hedlund Dec 4, 2014 5:39 PM in response to Quade321
    Level 6 (9,869 points)
    Dec 4, 2014 5:39 PM in response to Quade321

    Hi,

     

    First of all, I should point out that I am not familiar with the emulator in question, nor with the hard drive used.

     

    Normally, one would use a SCSI hard drive that has been formatted by a utility (Apple HD SC Setup, Drive Setup, FWB Hard Disk Toolkit, Lido, et cetera) on a Macintosh computer, thus ensuring that the proper hard disk drive driver software has been installed. It is per se possible to use a large capacity hard drive, providing that the volume size is correct (below 2 GB for System 6). If necessary, one can partition a drive to obtain a number of sufficiently small volumes.

     

    http://support.apple.com/kb/TA27115

     

    Proper termination of a SCSI hard drive is also needed.

     

    http://support.apple.com/kb/ta27743

     

    Because of the many unknown and/or uncertain factors in the setup described, it may not be a bad idea to try to find someone (via an Apple User group?) with another working older Macintosh computer to help you with the formatting of an external hard drive. Also, a bootable tools disk (800K DSDD/2DD diskette) can be very useful.

     

    https://www.apple.com/usergroups/

     

    Jan