Classic II - Drive initialization and cloning

[blatboy]

Greetings.

Now that my Classic II (right now running 7.0.1) has been recapped and is working, I'm looking to put a larger internal drive in it. I have Jag's CD of classic Mac stuff and I'd like to have a drive big enough to hold the whole thing, and then some.

I also have an old Wallstreet running 8.6 which is hooked up to the Classic II via LocalTalk.

I was able to get an Addonics SCSI-IDE converter (and a 50-68 pin adapter) so that I can, in theory, put an IDE drive in the Classic II. I'll need to initialize that drive and then clone the old SCSI drive onto it.

So, my questions:

1. JDW mentioned in this thread that the amazing Wallstreet he obtained came with a AKE USB 2.0 cardbus. Is that this one, and would that specific one work with my Wallstreet?
   
2. The smallest IDE I have is 40GB. If I'm understanding what I'm reading, I'll need to make some partitions. Once I have that drive hooked up to the Wallstreet via a USB cardbus, I should be able to initialize and partition the drive via the Wallstreet's Drive Setup utility, correct? OR will I need to pick up some more adapters and use the HD SC Setup program, hooking the new drive to the Wallstreet via SCSI?
   
3. How do I make a bootable clone of the original SCSI drive on the Classic II to a partition on the new drive?

I've done some research, but am still a little unclear. I know the info is out there somewhere on this, and if this is all in one obvious place and I'm missing it, please point me in the right direction and I apologize for bugging you with my classic Mac noobie-ness.

Oh, and one other little thing... now that I recapped my Classic II and got it working, word got around in my neighborhood and now I seem to be a Classic Mac Magnet. My neighbor just gave me his old (non working) SE which I think has the /30 upgrade. I've yet to crack that one open yet... it's pretty cool though!

Thanks!

[nvdeynde]

Have you recapped the Analog board as well ?

Keep in mind that the PSU of the Classic is not very strong, so when choosing a large HDD: look at the power consumption, especially the spin-up power requirements are important.

As for partitioning it: there's a universial Boot Disk with OS 7.6 on Gamba's website that also has a patched version of Apple's HD SC Setup 7.3.5
That would do the job. You can create multiple partitions of 4GB. Start HD SC setup and go for Partition, them Custom, and create as many 4GB partition as you need.

http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/bootdisks.html

My personal choice for larger than 4GB hard drives is FWB Toolkit.
Boot with the Crisis disk of FWB Toolkit 2.0.6: this formatter automatically partitions your drive and initializes all the partitions so they immediately show up on your desktop upon next reboot.

Since it's a Classic II, with 10MB of Ram, I would use OS 7.5.5
You can download OS 7.5.3 from Apple's Older software List webpage and also the update of 7.5.5

As for cloning your existing hard drive: that's easy. Select all folders/files and drag them to your new hard drive.
I think OS 7.5.5 will be the better option for a Classic II with 10MB of Ram. If you have less than 10MB and don't want to expand it, then OS 7 is the best choice.

[blatboy]

Thanks! That's a lot of great information, and the link is a treasure trove of solid stuff. I bookmarked it.

I've got 8MB right now. I do plan to expand it to 10MB after I get the HD situation sorted out.

I've not replaced the caps on the analog board. Looking at the drive that I'm planning to use, I don't see any sort of information about the power consumption on it, outside of the current rating on the rails, which doesn't seem to be the info I'm looking for. It's an older drive, made in 2003, but that's still about a decade more modern than the Classic II. Is it a matter of looking up specs on the interweb, or are there ways of testing the consumption?

I'd rather not deal with the analog board, but I will if I have to. Would you recommend that I look for an alternate drive? I was considering contacting Herb to see if he had any SCSI drives, but then I saw the IDE-SCSI adapter, and thought that was my better bet...

[blatboy]

Actually, I found some specs for the drive, but I don't quite know if the consumption is too much:

Code: Select all

Power Requirements
Mode           5V 12V
           ------------
Seek (mA)     562 440
Idle (mA)     396 440
Standby (mA)   65 35

It is a 7200RPM drive which may be a bit of overkill....

[beachycove]

I doubt that it is humanly possible to fill up a 2gb scsi drive in a Classic II, with all the 68k software in the world that would actually run tolerably well on it, so I'd say, save yer adapters for another machine and buy a largish scsi hd and be done with it.

And I'd advise reading the online piece on how to make 7.5.5 like 7.1 if you are really going to shoehorn it into a CII. Why make a nice machine run like a 400lb 50 year-old with all that overhead?

My $0.02.

[nvdeynde]

According to the technical specs Apple published in a Developer note on the Classic, with 440 mah you are clearly overloading the 12 volts rail.
Inrush current to spin-up the drive will be even higher, probably more than 1A, so the hard drive you have isn't probably going to work or not for long anyway...

Here's the paper with all the technical specs. On page 19 in Table 1-3, you can see the power limitations for the hard drive.

http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/documentation/Hardware/Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-68K_Desktop/Mac_Classic.pdf


If you want a large HDD that draws less power, go for a 5400 rpm at most.
Another option, since you already have a SCSI to IDE adapter, is to use this combined with a 2.5" SSD IDE drive.
I have an SE/30 with an SSD drive combined with an Acard SCSi-IDE adapter and it works great, using very little power too.

[blatboy]

Yeah, especially after reading all this I'm now leaning towards just getting another SCSI drive. Of course it's after I spent the money on the adapters, but at least they weren't too pricey and probably will have some other use down the line. Are forums & homebrew retro sites the best way to go about finding a SCSI drive these days? I know I ain't gonna find that on OWC or NewEgg!

I've searched a little and found a 50 pin refurbished 2GB drive for about $130. Maybe I'll go that route after my next paycheck.

My basic plan has been to stay with 7.1. From everything I've read, I should be able to do everything I want to do with that OS. As it is, the Classic II runs much faster than the Wallstreet. That being said, I've not cleaned up and optimized the Wallstreet just yet.

[EDIT] Just saw some SSD IDE drives (64g) for even less than the refurbished SCSI. Interesting....
[ANOTHER EDIT] some 2G ones too. Crazy!
Thanks!

[nvdeynde]

I would definately not spend 100$ on a refurbished drive.
You should be able to find a 2 or 4GB 50-pin SCSI drive for less than 50$ on Ebay or from a fellow collector here.

If I were you, I would go for the SSD option

[blatboy]

Yeah, I'm definitely leaning in the SSD direction. It's quiet and cool (and fast!)