[SOLVED] Booting from external Floppy on Mac Plus

[tedward]

Still trying to learn my way around this old Macintosh hardware but, as far as I understand, you still have to use the internal floppy drive to boot and the external expander is for a second drive only. Assuming that's correct, I'd like to use something like the BMOW switcher which is advertised as for use with a IIc. Does anyone know if this switcher is compatible with the classic macs other than the IIc? Am I completely wrong and it's in fact possible to boot these from the external floppy without 3rd party hardware?

 

[finkmac]

Either floppy drive will work for booting, it just boots from the first floppy drive with a valid system folder.

There is no need to use that fancy switcher, in fact I'd avoid even trying as Apple II floppy port pinouts can often be (dangerously) different from the Mac floppy pinout.

 

[tedward]

Thank you for confirming my suspicion. It's probably obvious from the post but I have yet to boot this system I just acquired (still missing a mouse). But I ordered a BMOW floppy emu to work on getting it to boot and when I saw that the IIc needed that switcher it made me wonder if the Mac was similar, but I was concerned that the floppy pinouts might be different, thus causing those two jumpers to be wired up incorrectly.

I look forward to the arrival of the emu. I plan on creating some boot floppies for the machine so I can get that authentic boot up sound, using the emu only as a secondary drive. But I needed some way to boot from the emu once to bootstrap the process.