CD Rom with a Mac Classic

[Tempest]

I'm having a weird problem trying to get a CD ROM drive to work with my Mac Classic.  I had a working CD Drive but I decided to use it with a different system, so I found that I had a spare NEC CD-3010A and a spare enclosure so I hooked those up.  I'm using FWB CD Toolkit and the SCSI scan in the control panel sees the drive (and detects when I have disc in it), but it never shows up on the desktop and the icon at boot time shows a ? like it can't find anything.  I know my system works with CD Roms because the old external drive works just fine (too bad I need it for something else).  Why would the control panel SCSI scan detect it but not let it be usable on the desktop?  Is it too fast or something (I think it's a 40x). This is very weird.

What is the recommended CD drive to use with a compact mac?  I have a CD150 but I couldn't get that to work either (not sure it's actually any good anyway).

 

[techknight]

I think you need CD Sunrise extension to get 3rd party drives to work, Also I would use SCSI probe to make sure the bus even sees the drive, and that its terminated. I also think you need system 7 but I cant recall. 

Also, I dont think you can boot a non apple CD drive, and may not even be able to boot CD at all on a 68000 but I cannot fully recall that in the memory banks, its been too long. 

 

[Tempest]

Where can I get the CD Sunrise extension? 

The bus is seeing the drive because the SCSI scan in the FWB control panel sees the drive and reports when there's a disc in it, but nothing ever appears on the desktop.

I'm using System 6.0.8

 

[Juror22]

If memory serves, there was a NEC CD extension that was needed for the NEC SCSI drives to even see them.  I also don't recall whether or not the NEC drives could boot a mac, but I would tend to doubt that it could.

Google "NEC cdrom extension" (without the quotes) the drive museum link should work for you - it lists the sunrise extension, among others.

As an additional suggestion - I had an external Mac SCSI drive that would intermittently (mostly not) boot and copy correctly.  I changed out the drive mechanism and it was exactly the same.  The CD was bad and re-burning the CD 'fixed' the issue.

 

[Tempest]

Ok I'll try that. I don't need to actually boot from the CD, I'm just using it for transferring data.

 

[Scott Baret]

If you can track down CD-ROM Toolkit, I know version 2.0 works with NEC drives. I used it with an obscure NEC 3-speed drive that I picked up many years ago. Heads up: Toolkit 2.0 requires System 7.

 

[Tempest]

Hmm... Well my Classic only has 6.0.8 but my Color Classic does does 7.

 

[techknight]

I dont think you can mount CDs on a System 6 machine. But I solidly cannot remember. I havent used System 6 in a long time, all my stuff is System 7+

 

[Tempest]

The SpeedyCD drivers worked like a charm.  Thanks everyone!