System 7 and Mac Classic questions

[SteveFury]

Greetings.

I have a MacClassic that I"ve been working on.

You can skip down to my specific questions in BOLD if you like.

I had about 10 MacPlusses, a MacClassic and MacClassic II about 15 years ago. It was my first experience with Mac and I learned a lot about the OS at the time.

All the Mac Plus's got donated and I kept the Classic and Classic II in storage.

I have taken the Classic and Classic II out of storage with intent to restore them for nestalgia. The Classic II is dead. I recall pluggin it in about 5 years ago and got a screen full of vertical blocks, like a huge checkerboard.

I recently turned it on again and got a clicking noise with spiral-shaped lightning flashes on the screen. I checked the analog board for leaky caps, bad solder joints etc. Everything visually looks good.

Using a DVMM, it is producing +5, +12 and -12 voltages.

I removed the motherboard and checked for bad solder joints, particularly around the power connector. Visually looks good. I reseat the EPROMs and SIMS. I put it all back together and turn it on. The only life it shows at all is a spinning cooling fan.

So I set the dead Classic II aside and work on the Mac Classic instead.

I find the Classic boots just fine to System 7. Checking it over, I find the floppy drive reads all disks as locked. I took the drive out of the Classic II and put it into the Classic. The 1.44mb drive works fine.

The inside of the Classic was filthy, so I took a lot of time to disassemble and clean it. Removed the analog and mother board, CRT, fan and metal chassis and floppy drive. I used an old toothbrush to dry-scrub the motherboard and memory expansion board, dry-wiped everything clean and blew the remaining dust with light air pressure from an air tank.

Even scrubbed and waxed the case.

Re-installed everything, re-adjusted the CRT (position, size etc) along with slight adjustments to the deflection magnets to make a square raster.

My Classic lives again.

I had also donated most of my old MAC documentation and have forgotten much of system 6 and system 7. So I have some....

Questions:

I want to reinstall system 7.0 on my Classic. Why? The existing image is at least 15 years old. Some of the installed programs no longer work. I want to have a fresh system with only working applications.

1. I want to back-up the existing applications that still work on floppy disks. Can I just copy their folder from the HDD onto the floppy, then later copy them back and have them still work?

2. I have a Windows Vista computer with a 1.44mb floppy drive. I have System 7 disk images which I downloaded from the internet. I have done a lot of research how to copy mac boot images (Mac, Mac plus, SE etc) around the net. There seem to be a few methods, none of them seem particularly easy.

What is your personal preferred method of creating mac readable disks on the PC?

3. I have pretty much given up on the dead Classic II. I tried putting its motherboard in the Classic but it remained dead.

I plan to use my Classic for just a few minutes periodically over the course of a year. (I troubleshoot Juniper backbone routers for a living, the Classic will be merely a desk ornament... tribute to the past kind of thing).

Does the analog board need to be re-capped for such light use?

Thanks for your time, and replies in advance.

-Steve

 

[Scott Baret]

I'll tackle these one by one:

1. I'm assuming your original disks no longer work. It's usually best to reinstall from those, but if you need to make a backup from what's already installed, it will work in most cases--but keep the following in mind:

--Most older programs (pre-System 7 era) have all their files stored in one folder. This is pretty easy to back up.

--Some newer programs, specifically those from Claris and Microsoft, keep data files in the System Folder.

--Back up all your fonts, since some programs will install fonts.

--There are a few programs which only permitted one hard drive install from the master disk. If it no longer works, you're out of luck. Fortunately, I've only seen two cases of this (FastBreak by Accolade and Dietary Analysis by Orange Juice Systems--yes, that's the name of the company).

What programs in particular are you dealing with?

2. Your best bet is to pick up a cheap OS 9 machine and make the floppies from there. Look for a beige G3 (which can handle both 800K and 1.4MB disks) or an iMac G3 (which can be had rather cheap right now) with a USB floppy drive (also dirt cheap if you know where to look). The USB floppy drives can only handle 1.4MB disks, but since you have a Classic, it's not a big deal, and even if you do get an 800K drive machine up and running, you can always convert between the formats on the Classic. There are indeed a few ways to do it from a Windows PC, but honestly, by the time you get it done, you'll have wished you had just bought an old iMac--which also gives you a fun classic you can run on the internet using the excellent Classilla browser. (It's a little bit limited and you'll have to use mobile versions of some sites, but it's nonetheless a good experience).

3. Classic IIs are notorious for logic board failures due to bad caps. You'll want to get the logic board (the main board) recapped (contact Uniserver on here; he's recapped several of my boards and has always done a professional job). The Classic Is will need it too, it's just that they tend to last a little longer than their II counterparts (at least in my experience). Eventually, you'll want the analog board recapped, too. (This is the vertical board which contains the power supply).

 

[Elfen]

That Classic II can be revived most of the time with a recapping. There will be broken/rotten traces to deal with however. If you think it's too much then like it is said, send it to Uniserver. He's great in recapping and repairs. And the price is right too.

With the Classic, you can boot the internal ROM Drive with Option-Apple-X-O. This will load up System 6.0.8 in the ROM (the only Mac to have this option...). From there you can test your hard drives and check their content. You can even swap out the Classic hard drive with the Classic II hard drive and check on it as well.

You need a minimum of 4MB of RAM for System 7. But if it boots and is working, you do not need to reinstall it. You should at least rebuild the DeskTop by holding down Option-Apple during booting. In its history, there only has been some 30 viruses in the Mac System, so there is little worry on that. Getting the last version of Disinfectant and run it will clean things up if you think there is a chance of being infected.

Making a Mac Boot Disk on a PC is not easy and it does not work on the SE with an 800K Drive, The Mac Plus, Mac 512K/128K, and Some Mac IIs with the 800K Drives. They only work on Macs with high density drives, and even then you need to get the format right or it won't work. It is much easier to have another older Mac like a PowerBook to make Boot Disks and leave PCs out of the equation.

You can also get a copy of StuffIt to compress larger files and divide them up to fit on on or more high density disks. Better would be getting a SCSI CD-Burner and burn copies of the stuff on the hard drive onto a CD. You can make a bootable CD but that is a bit tricky to do, best to do it as an archiving tool. A working Zip/Jazz Drive will also work well.

If you are going to recap the logic board (as in the case with the Classic II to bring it back to life and on the Classic as a preventative measure), it is best to recap the analog board at the same time. Light usage or not, some caps fail whether you use the machine or not while others fail from heavy usage. Best to get that fixed up and get that situation away.

 

[Dav]

Hello SteveFury,

Here is a way to create the installation disks you need for your Classic from a PC.

As you still have a working system on your Classic, it's quite easy.

All you need is HFVExplorer for PC and some 1.4 MB floppy disks.

#1 - Format some blank 1.4 MB floppy  disks (MacOS format) on the Classic.

#2 - Download "HFVExplorer" on your PC (this program allows you to read and write on MacOS disk directly from the PC).

#3 - Copy the .image.sea.bin files you downloaded on the blank disks with HFVExplorer

If DiskCopy 4.2 isn't on your Classic, search for "Disk_Copy_4.2.sea.bin". You will need it to create the disks from the images.

Left-side window ; the donwloaded files ; Right-side window ; two files copied on a macintosh disk with HFVExplorer. The name of the mac disk is "Untitled".

#4 - Copy back the files on the hard drive of the Classic...

... and decompress them

#5 - Generate the installation disks with DiskCopy 4.2 (open each .image with DiskCopy on the Classic).

Happy new year to you all