Booting an SE off a JAZ Drive

[Saberpeep]

Hello, I was wondering if anyone could help me with booting off a JAZ disc. I recently acquired a Macintosh SE, however the hard disc is dead. I have a JAZ drive that I've never used before, and was wondering if I could get it to boot my SE. I plugged it into my Beige G3, formatted the disk, and installed system 7.1 on it. I left the disk in the drive and plugged it into my SE. I turned the jaz drive on, then the SE, (as I've been told it will act like a regular HDD if I do this). However, upon startup, the SE doesn't even seem to access the JAZ drive. I have tried setting the internal termination to auto and on as well as different scsi ids. I take it there is more to this issue that I don't know.

Any help would be appreciated, Thanks!

 

[flecom]

did you format the drive as HFS?

 

[Saberpeep]

I formatted it using the Beige G3 running 9.2.2, which calls it "MacOS standard". ( As a side note I previously did a similar procedure and got the SE to boot off an internal zip drive, but I only have one SCSI zip drive, and I had to borrow it from the G3. However, this JAZ drive, unlike the zip drive, is external. )

 

[Saberpeep]

After staying up late and doing some serious trial-and-error, I managed to figure it out. For those of you in the future who have the same problem: You have to use iomega driver version 4.3, and its respective tools program. Iomega driver version 4.2 is too old to work with JAZ disks it seems. Iomega driver version 5.x or greater is too new to work with or boot a classic Macintosh. You must use iomega tools 4.3 to format the disk before installing SSW, even if it seems to be already formatted ok. The formatting process puts a version of the drivers into a partition on the JAZ disk, which makes it bootable. You do not need a copy of the iomega drivers on the machine you are trying to boot with (at least on my SE, further testing needed).

I found some articles online for Zip disks (written 14 years ago), saying you need to use 4.2, but for JAZ disks, you must use 4.3, apparently.

 

[olePigeon]

That's very helpful, thanks.

 

[Elfen]

Great work on figuring out, Saberpeep!

 

[Saberpeep]

If you're interested, I wrote up an article about my experience getting my Macintosh SE working, with JAZ drive and serial file sharing. http://saberpeep.blogspot.com/2016/03/my-new-macintosh-se.html