It started out a bit difficult. First I wanted to test the box before installing the ][e card, and I needed to fiddle with cd600i jumpers to something it was happy with. It psyches me out that this is the only Mac I have seen which flashes a happy boot Mac for a second even if there is no boot volume. Then the screen blips to the familiar "?" drive. I kept thinking it was trying to boot off the cd...
As for floppies, I had shaky luck with those too. At first it would not format any blank ones. And it hung if I tried good ones. So I took the drive apart and found that the head spring had jumped out of its groove. Fixed. Wonder if it one of those "superdrives" that can read and write DD and HD disks.
Then I loaded the Apple Legacy CD and installed 7.5.3. It was weird because the install was all floppy images and I was really, really hoping I would not need to get the drive working well enough to copy those. Instead the "net install" script installed the OS with no problems. First I created a dual partition with 10 MB ProDOS and the other -2GB in HFS. Speaking of HFS, this thing won't read HFS+ CDs - I wonder if there is an extension which works with them in an update. Then I installed the ][e card and software, and it boots! I am going to seriously rack my brain trying to remember how to get around in ][ since it has been almost 30 years. Only inconvenience is switching between 24 and 32 bit addressing, but it is not too bad. 32-bit and caches on this thing feels spry, I like! And the full 040 will hopefully arrive soon.
Bedtime for now, but next step is to try to update it with latest CD and AppleShare. Otherwise I will collect my desired apps and burn onto straight HFS discs.
As for floppies, I had shaky luck with those too. At first it would not format any blank ones. And it hung if I tried good ones. So I took the drive apart and found that the head spring had jumped out of its groove. Fixed. Wonder if it one of those "superdrives" that can read and write DD and HD disks.
Then I loaded the Apple Legacy CD and installed 7.5.3. It was weird because the install was all floppy images and I was really, really hoping I would not need to get the drive working well enough to copy those. Instead the "net install" script installed the OS with no problems. First I created a dual partition with 10 MB ProDOS and the other -2GB in HFS. Speaking of HFS, this thing won't read HFS+ CDs - I wonder if there is an extension which works with them in an update. Then I installed the ][e card and software, and it boots! I am going to seriously rack my brain trying to remember how to get around in ][ since it has been almost 30 years. Only inconvenience is switching between 24 and 32 bit addressing, but it is not too bad. 32-bit and caches on this thing feels spry, I like! And the full 040 will hopefully arrive soon.
Bedtime for now, but next step is to try to update it with latest CD and AppleShare. Otherwise I will collect my desired apps and burn onto straight HFS discs.