6100/66 DOS resurection

[zefrenchtoon]

Hi everyone !

I saved from bin long time ago a 6100/66 Dos Compatible and since few weeks, I am trying to resurect it to have some fun with it.

First, I changed battery and installed a BlueSCSI to replace the faulty SCSI hdd on which I created two "drives" of 2GB each.
Second, I changed the Apple 300i CD drive by a Pioneer 303S DVD drive (I know that DVD is sort of useless in this kind of computer but it was taking dust in an old 7500 in my parents attic so …).
Then, I tried to instal some different versions of MacOS on it.
The goal is to get a 9.1 and a 7.6 with DOS card support to "play" with some DOS software.

As I have 40MB of RAM, I think It is ok to run almost what I want. Maybe I will try to find faster (and newer) RAM in the future but this is not my priority.
It did install 9.0 on one of my emulated disks and 7.6 on another one.

Now, the different problems I have are:

1. I could not install 7.5.3 from a genuine CD for an unknown reason.
2. I am unable to update 9.0 to 9.1 using a genuine update CD.
3. Booting from 9.0 is very slow …
4. Finally, my 7.6 fresh install crash at startup (see attached "screenshot", and yes, it is a French 7.6 …).

If you have any idea/answer …
Thank you for your attention

 

[zefrenchtoon]

Asap, I will try to update to 7.6.1. Maybe it will fix this crash :-/

 

[slomacuser]

I had same crash problems and could not install system 7.5.3 on mine until I changed the hard drive to 500-1 GB. Even formatted 4 GB and partitioned to two 2 GB gave me problems..

 

[zefrenchtoon]

I had same crash problems and could not install system 7.5.3 on mine until I changed the hard drive to 500-1 GB. Even formatted 4 GB and partitioned to two 2 GB gave me problems..

Damn!
I did not think about a partition size problem Thanks !
What did you do about the crash ? Did you find a clue ?

 

[zefrenchtoon]

Extracted from Apple tech note:


With versions of the Macintosh operating system previous to System 7.5 we recommend making the volume sizes slightly less than 2 GB to ensure that you do not run into any limitations.

This means that if you have a hard disk drive with a formatted capacity larger than the 2 GB, you must partition it into multiple volumes smaller than 2 GB. We have found that a partition size at least 1 MB smaller than 2 GB seems to work acceptably.

Source:

Macintosh Operating System: Maximum Volume Size

 

[zefrenchtoon]

Ok, I confirm that by dividing my drive by 2 partitions of 1GB, I could install easily 7.5.3 rev2 on one of them and then 7.6 on the other. I did not have enough time to try to boot on 7.6 but 7.5.3 is working !

Thanks for the advice !

 

[zefrenchtoon]

Update:

7.6 boots if and only if I disable extensions at boot time.
I tried to update to 7.6.1, same behaviour.
I tried to use Extensions Manager to use only the "base" profile and it still crash.
I will continue to disable manually extensions to find THE one which cause the crash.

 

[Cory5412]

This is real fun and it looks like you've made a lot of progress!

Mac OS 9 will be able to handle larger partitions (up to 2TB on this hardware) although at that point, I think system 7 may not be able to see the other partitions, so dual booting may be annoying. If you can get 7.6.1 running, it can also see partitions up to 2TB, although I don't know how it'll handle HFS+ (I should test this out at some point) -- many of my systems that dualboot 7 and 9 use plain HFS boot partitions, and then you can use an HFS+ data partition for the 9 side of things, should you need.

As a heads up, 9 will probably be pretty pokey on here, but it may be worth doing as an intermediary between newer systems, especially if you aren't planning on doing a lot of updates to 7.6 or 7.6.1. I have either 32 or 40 megs in mine too, with Classic Mac OS, you either have enough ram or don't and 9 is slow on these regardless, so I wouldn't worry too much about RAM unless you want to do something really heavy. A lot of this is just a question of how much patience you have.

In terms of that crash: That at least doesn't happen to me on my 6100/60 dos and the en-us retail 7.6.1 CD,were you using retail or a disc optimized for a specific Mac like the 1400c/166, 6500/275+ or one of the Mach5 PCI PowerMacs? If you can find retail, try that, but the method you're using of enabling extensions one at a time (and maybe just leave out anything you don't think you'll need in general) is probably the best way to suss out an extensions conflict.

Some guides suggested doing about half of the total extensions (just any random half) to make the process a bit faster, but that depends on how many you have and your patience.

With extension manager, you can also create sets for different tasks and this is a real-world thing people who had multi-purpose machines in theory did. Lots of software at the time recommended running without networking entirely, for example.

 

[zefrenchtoon]

This is real fun and it looks like you've made a lot of progress!

Mac OS 9 will be able to handle larger partitions (up to 2TB on this hardware) although at that point, I think system 7 may not be able to see the other partitions, so dual booting may be annoying. If you can get 7.6.1 running, it can also see partitions up to 2TB, although I don't know how it'll handle HFS+ (I should test this out at some point) -- many of my systems that dualboot 7 and 9 use plain HFS boot partitions, and then you can use an HFS+ data partition for the 9 side of things, should you need.

As a heads up, 9 will probably be pretty pokey on here, but it may be worth doing as an intermediary between newer systems, especially if you aren't planning on doing a lot of updates to 7.6 or 7.6.1. I have either 32 or 40 megs in mine too, with Classic Mac OS, you either have enough ram or don't and 9 is slow on these regardless, so I wouldn't worry too much about RAM unless you want to do something really heavy. A lot of this is just a question of how much patience you have.

In terms of that crash: That at least doesn't happen to me on my 6100/60 dos and the en-us retail 7.6.1 CD,were you using retail or a disc optimized for a specific Mac like the 1400c/166, 6500/275+ or one of the Mach5 PCI PowerMacs? If you can find retail, try that, but the method you're using of enabling extensions one at a time (and maybe just leave out anything you don't think you'll need in general) is probably the best way to suss out an extensions conflict.

Some guides suggested doing about half of the total extensions (just any random half) to make the process a bit faster, but that depends on how many you have and your patience.

With extension manager, you can also create sets for different tasks and this is a real-world thing people who had multi-purpose machines in theory did. Lots of software at the time recommended running without networking entirely, for example.

Thanks for your answer.

Handling is different than can be used for boot and this experience seems to prove that MacOS 7.x does not like 2048MB partitions (as Apple said on their support page).

About HFS+, it is officially handled only since MacOS 8.1 but Elliot Nunn had make it working on MacOS 7.x/8.0 as we can see on its GitHub here: https://github.com/elliotnunn/HFSPlusBackport

I think I will try its work.

About my 7.6 crash, I used different retail CD (even the one from the Anthology) and all give the same. As I told, I did use the Extension Manager to disable Extensions using the "MacOS (base)" profile. I will have to strip down this profile to evacuate the failing extension once I detect it.
Because the crash is located at very early stage of boot, it should be easy to find it.

I just have to find enough time to investigate ... ^^'

 

[Cory5412]

Here's the limits: https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/volume-size-limits-under-hfs-and-hfs.3872/ - there's info about which TIL/KB article each of those limits were documented in on that post.

Replicated here for convenience in this context:
Under any '030 or earlier, the maximum volume limit is 4 gigs regardless of the OS.

040s and newer can generally support as much as the running OS supports.

Up through to 7.1 has a 2-gig limit, 7.5.x has a 4-gig limit (although in some cases 7.5.1/2/3/4 were unstable if you actually used this), and 7.6.1 supports all the way up to 2TB on any '040 or better.

I haven't looked at the HFS+ backporting efforts recently, but that could help making rebooting from 7 to 9 from within 7 a bit easier.

Crashing early at boot is a good hint, the extensions are loaded alphabetically so you may be able to narrow this down based on pulling out just the first few extensions then putting them back in one at a time.

 

[zefrenchtoon]

I'm back for some good news !

I've found the faulty extension in the name of ... Apple CD Driver !

As I said, I changed my CD drive for a Pioneer one that is not supported by Apple driver but while I have no issue with 7.5.3 and 9, in 7.6 it crashes while loading the Apple CD driver. Maybe because it is the "special version that accept third party drives" ?
BTW, I installed Intech CD/DVD SpeedTools instead and it is working flawlessly now.

Also, I did some bench with the 3 OSes using MacBench 4 and while OS 9 is better than the other on FPU, it is slower on CPU and disk. Then 7.6 is sligthly better than 7.5.3 on CPU/disk.