5260/100 booting from SD card.

[wunjee]

Good evening!

So, recently I pulled my old 5260/100 out of the garage. This was my first computer. My parents bought it for me when I was 13 for my birthday and I've held onto it all this time. It's got the full 64mb RAM and at some point we upgraded it to the 1.2TB HDD from the 800MB drive.

I was doing some research and saw that some are using IDE to SD readers to use an SD card as a boot device. I still have the original recovery CD for the machine but apparently the CDROM drive isn't working because a reboot+C never even spins up the disc, and it goes right to the flashing ? disk.

How can I write an OS to this SD card? Preferably from a Windows 10 device since my laptop has an SD reader. I'd like to run OS 8.6, but 7.5.5 or 7.5.3 would also be fine.

Thanks in advance, and I'm looking forward to whatever I can do with this old beast! It still holds a special place in my heart.

 

[wunjee]

Well, a bit of an update. I did get my CDROM working. Pulled it out and sprayed the contacts down with some alcohol and away it went. It's unfortunate how brittle the plastics are, though. You can't do much of anything without destroying something...

Anyway, when I boot off the system CD and launch Drive Setup to initialize the disk, I get an "Initialization Failed" error. With both a 32gb SD card and an 8gb SD card.

 

[Franklinstein]

Old Macs can be touchy about ATA-to-SD adapters, mostly because their built-in ATA interface is old and fairly limited and can't figure out how to talk to the SD card's ATA interface. Most people have better luck using a direct CF adapter rather than using SD for this reason since CF cards' built-in ATA interface is usually more willing to talk to old hardware than the average SD adapter's, which is usually tuned to modern UltraATA standards that old Macs never had.

If you want to keep trying, make sure the SD adapter is set to master/drive 0. Also if there's an option on the adapter, disable UltraATA and/or try to set the interface to PIO mode.

 

[wunjee]

Old Macs can be touchy about ATA-to-SD adapters, mostly because their built-in ATA interface is old and fairly limited and can't figure out how to talk to the SD card's ATA interface. Most people have better luck using a direct CF adapter rather than using SD for this reason since CF cards' built-in ATA interface is usually more willing to talk to old hardware than the average SD adapter's, which is usually tuned to modern UltraATA standards that old Macs never had.

If you want to keep trying, make sure the SD adapter is set to master/drive 0. Also if there's an option on the adapter, disable UltraATA and/or try to set the interface to PIO mode.

Thanks for the reply!

This is the adapter I'm using. Apparently it's hard-set to master, so I shouldn't have a problem there. The comments state that others have used it successfully with old IDE Macs. I actually think it's the card. I've gotten it to the point where Drive Setup will see the SD Card and I can create the partitions (A 2gb partition and a second partition using the rest of the drive) but that's where things go sideways. It always fails in partitioning the SD card.

I'm wondering if it's because I'm using SDHC cards. I need to make it to WalMart and see if I can find a smaller non-HC SD card. I have a feeling that'll work.

I feel bad working on this computer as far as actually trying to get to components because it seems like just touching it wrong causes the plastics to just crumble. And this thing's been indoors it's entire life! Not even in the garage!

 

[Cory5412]

Welcome in!

My apologies for the delay posting this, I actually don't have too many great ideas on this one because I have yet to get one of these adapters for myself, but I have meant to.

In these macs, SD cards are the better option, CF adapters work poorly because choices Apple made to acknowledge removable media (which CF cards often identify themselves as) on the IDE bus. Some more notes are on here: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/help-ide-to-compact-flash-not-working.38648/

The size shouldn't be that big of a problem, although if you're using 7.5 I'd say limiting yourself to 4GB partitions is a good idea because even 7.5.5 has problems with 4 or bigger gig volumes, if I remember right. That said, I haven't heard that these machines have any special or exceptional problems with bigger disks once you get to 7.6.1 or so (which itself supports up to 2TB volumes if the hardware will oblige.) I'd say aim for 120 gigs or less, though, because it wasn't until ~late 2002 that IDE hardware

One thing you may try is to see if a newer OS can set up and format the drive. If so, and you still want to use the original OS, you can then shut down and swap over to the original OS install media. (Although newer OSes may be slightly faster on these machines, I use my 6200/75 with 7.6.1 and Speed Doubler 8.)

I don't have any faster links, my apologies, but the retail 7.6.1 image or retail 8.5 image here should work: http://vtools.68kmla.org/~/coryw/iso-temp/ - but you can probably get it a bit faster from macgarden/repo/internetarchive. You can burn those ISOs on a Mac with disk utility or a PC with something like imgburn, or on linux/bsd/whatever with whatever your favorite ISO utility is there.

I would say 8.1 but I don't have a copy of the retail image there, the iMac 8.1 image behaves weirdly if you use it on anything other than the iMac.

 

[wunjee]

I've got an iso for OS 8.6, which is apparently the last OS the 5260/100 officially supported. Maybe I'll burn that and give it a shot.

Do I have to do anything special beside burn it at low speed if I'm making the disk on a PC?

 

[wunjee]

So I burned an 8.6 CD with imgburn. Burned it at 2x. When I put it in the Mac it starts to boot off the CD (happy Mac icon, can hear the disk spinning up) then about 10 seconds later it ejects the disk and goes to the [?] floppy.

I tried burning an 8.5 disk and it wouldn't even attempt to boot off that one. The 8.5 iso stated it's specifically for PPC Macs, which the 5260/100 is. So that's a little strange.

This is starting to get irritating.

 

[wunjee]

I got it finally. I just had to find a bootable 8.6 disk.

This is the image I used. Burned from a PC with Imgburn at 2x.

The Disk Setup on 8.6 immediately saw the SD card and I made a single 2gb partition and another to take up the remaining space. 8.6 installed on the 2gb partition with no issues.

It's a little bit slow on a 5260/100, even topped out at 64mb RAM, but it's good to have the rig working again.

I love this rig so much. I just wish the plastics weren't so fragile. Now to figure out how to get it on the internet...!

 

[mdeverhart]

Glad you got it working! It’s always exciting when these old machines can be used again, especially when they hold sentimental value.

 

[Cory5412]

Whoops, I had a draft going that I forgot to post.

Great you found a working image and things are running now! Unfortunately there's a lot out there that weren't correctly imaged and that's most of why they're not bootable.

And, yeah, 8.6 may be a bit slow on that machine. If you can find 8.1 that may be a bit of a better compromise in terms of newer functionality, rewritten/PPC ported components and still being relatively light on resources.

In general, 7.6.1 is where I go for 7 because IME it's the most stable and includes most of the batteries I need to use it how I do, and 8.1 is that much nicer because it's got nicer support for big disks (HFS+) and the multi-threaded finder, includes the AppleShare/OpenTransport updates needed to connect to ASIP and 10.4 servers more conveniently, plus I do like that platinum look, it's got finder folder tabs at the bottom of the screen, and it's got a couple more components moved to PPC compared to 7.6.1.

But, sometimes you just want a specific thing and now that you have the disk formatted you could go run the original OS and it should work fine!

 

[wunjee]

Yeah I may go back and reinstall System 7, but 8.6 is working okay. The only reason I chose 8.6 was because I saw there was still a reasonably-modern web browser that required 8.6+ but I found out the ethernet adapter I had set aside for this is PCI and not NuBus, so getting this one on the internet may be a no-go. I still have my original 33.6k external modem buuuuut...

I installed Speed Doubler 8 and it's trucking right along! Plays Warcraft, Starcraft, Command and Conquer, all the old games I wanted it to. And the CRT's colors are still spectacular.

 

[mikes-macs]

A Sony remote will turn it on and off. If you have Presentation System you can control it with remote. Can use IRTalk (an Infrared AppleTalk protocol). PDS and comm slot NICs were a dime a dozen not too long ago.

 

[mikes-macs]

There's a couple choices for ethernet. It takes a LC PDS Ethernet or Comm Slot Ethernet. I don't believe Macintosh 5260 can take Nubus.