A Floppy Catch-22

[GerrySch]

I have an interesting situation. I blew up my IDE boot drive on my 6500 yesterday. I lost access, to the files and with my limited knowledge, decided to replace the IDE drive with a 'new' one. I found a 300 GB Maxtor IDE drive and used a 6500 recover CD (I recently bought it for just this concern) to format and restore my boot drive (I could only format 128 GBs so lost half the drive). I've added a ethernet and USB PCI cards to improve connectivity. I found the driver for the ethernet card so it's now on line on my network but can't get any other laptops (M1 and Win11) on my local network to see the shared folder on the 6500. Yes, the TCP/IP control panel is set to ethernet and to get it's IP information from DHCP. I haven't found a driver for the Internal USB 2.0 PCI card so it's not working right now. To install the driver for the ethernet card was located on my Win11 and transferred it to the 6500 using my floppy. Worked great with no issues.
But, how do I move files between the 6500 and anything else when modern Macs don't support floppies anymore? How do I copy drivers or other files from my modern mac to the 6500? No USB, no SD cards nor FTP file tranfers. For instance, the PowerMac 6500 is only supported to 9.1 but I can use the OS 9 Helper Utility Patch to install 9.2.2 (I have a 9.2.1 CD and the universal 9.2.2 burned to disk) that MIGHT have drivers to activate my internal USB card. But, when I try to get the helper file from my Win 11 laptop, I plug in a USB floppy drive and copy the file to a PC formatted floppy and copy the .sit compressed file into my 6500. I do have the SCSI 100MB zip drive but my only external Zip drive I have is a 250 MB drive with 250 MB Zip media. And the 6500 Stuffit application can't decompress it because (I assume) putting it on a pc-formatted floppy damaged the file. So, I only have my floppy drive, or external SCSI storage like on a BlueSCSI drive. I just wish when I plug in my External BlueSCSI into the SCSI port on the back of the tower, it locks up the Mac. It's like pulling teeth here. So how do I fix my BlueSCSI so it doesn't hang up the 6500 when I plug it in or use floppies to copy compressed drivers? I wish my G3 iMac DV still worked.

Thank you for your time, patience at my log-winded explanations, and support,
Gerry

 

[Snial]

I guess because you haven't mentioned CD+/-RW, then you don't have a CD writer and writeable CDs any more?

Does the 6500 recovery CD contain ClarisWorks? It has a terminal emulator application. With that you can download stuff over serial using e.g. the XModem protocol. For example, you could download Fetch and then use FTP over the Ethernet port.

The 6500 has OpenFirmware, so you can (or someone can) write some code on that, perhaps? Probably quite challenging.

Failing ClarisWorks, AppleScript is a possibility.

 

[Byrd]

I tend to shuffle files between my 6500/TAM using either USB (slow 1.1 speeds but fine for little things), SCSI (real SCSI HD or SD based external device - SCSI2SD 5.1), or pull the HD itself for big jobs (moving an MP3 library for example).

The easiest would be your BlueSCSI; I'd pull the SD card installed put in another and format it on the 6500 itself. Have also come across freezes when the BlueSCSI/SD card was formatted in another Mac. If no other SD card, format this under OS X as FAT32 just to wipe out any remant HFS driver on the card.

There are no third-party USB drivers for PCI cards; they either work of they don't using the Apple supplied third-party USB PCI drivers as found on Mac OS 8.x and up installers. Usually the card or box will state "OHCI compliant" and just work @ USB 1.1 speeds.

 

[nathall]

If you can get the .SIT file BinHexed before a Windows file system touches it, it will preserve the file.

So, find a BinHex tool for whatever OS version you have on your MacBook. Download the OS 9 Helper on that machine and then BinHex it. Then, you can transfer it to your Win 11 machine, then to a floppy, then to the 6500. Most versions of StuffIt Expander should be able to un-BinHex it and then expand the preserved .SIT.

EDIT: Here’s a BinHex tool that might run on your MacBook.

 

[Snial]

<snip> I found the driver for the ethernet card so it's now on line on my network but can't get any other laptops (M1 and Win11) on my local network to see the shared folder on the 6500.

It won't understand the AppleTalk protocol used to share the folder. However, if you've installed 9.2.1 as you say later, then you should be able to activate Personal Web Sharing on the 6500 and I think you can create a public folder on the Mac side you can drop files onto.

Chapter 31. Web Sharing Control Panel

<snip> modern Macs don't support floppies anymore?

You're saying your USB floppy drive won't work on the Mac?

<snip> (I have a 9.2.1 CD and the universal 9.2.2 burned to disk)

So, you do have a CD burner?

<snip>And the 6500 Stuffit application can't decompress it because (I assume) putting it on a pc-formatted floppy damaged the file.

Two other explanations: it's not seeing the right file type (which will get lost if you've used a PC-formatted disk) or you compressed it on a later version of Stuffit with a different file format.

Another mechanism is to use HFS Utils, which allows you to copy HFS-formatted media.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/hfsutils

But there's also HFVExplorer, as described here. That works on Windows 10 (and @bigmessowires said it worked on Win 11).

https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/windows-hfs-read-write-in-2023.45287/

With these you could create a 1.44MB HFS disk image and mount it on e.g. miniVMac; copy the files you want (preserving the file types), then use the HFSUtils/HFVExplorer to copy them to the proper FD, which should then mount OK on your 6500, preserving all the file types.

 

[aladds]

However, if you've installed 9.2.1 as you say later, then you should be able to activate Personal Web Sharing on the 6500 and I think you can create a public folder on the Mac side you can drop files onto.

And going the other way you can use a web browser on the Mac to pull things off of a modern computer. A Mac or Linux machine will be easiest, but you can make this work with Windows too. Make a folder, put the stuff in it you want to share (hopefully you have Stuffit Expander on your 6500) open a terminal in that folder and type "python3 -m http.server" - point the 6500's browser to that folder and you should get a downloadable file listing

 

[Snial]

And going the other way you can use a web browser on the Mac to pull things off of a modern computer. A Mac or Linux machine will be easiest, but you can make this work with Windows too. Make a folder, put the stuff in it you want to share (hopefully you have Stuffit Expander on your 6500) open a terminal in that folder and type "python3 -m http.server" - point the 6500's browser to that folder and you should get a downloadable file listing

Good point. If it's just http it should be OK on anything above 8.1. The PM6500 shipped with 7.5.5, but it seems like he can make bootable CDs for anything else. Personally I'd go with 9.1. I think @GerrySch is fairly fortunate to get a PM6500/300. It was the fastest 603e available, though, even at 300MHz it'd be quite a bit slower than a G3/233. According to LEM, a PM6500/250 has a performance of 2.3 (relative to a PM7500/80) so a PM6500/300 would be about 2.76. An iMac G3/233 (Rev A) has a performance of 4.5 relative to a PM7500/100, so that's about 5.63 relative to a PM7500/80. Hence such an iMac would be nearly exactly 2x faster than a PM6500.

However, I quite like the jelly bean, rounded aesthetic of the PM6500 and PM6400. I did contemplate getting a PM6400 in 1996, but eventually chose the ugly PM4400 as it was so much cheaper.