Installing OS 7.5 or 8.1 without a CD Drive

[Mark2001]

I've perchased my second compact Mac (CC) the first being a Classic II. My CC is upgraded with an LC550 LB and 36mb of RAM and a farallon ethernet card. Haven't done the highres hack yet, but I may while recapping the analog board. The drive is full of all kinds of setting and apps I don't really want from the previous user and I'd like to do a fresh install. I'm considering 8.1 so I'll have HFS+, but 7.5 would be fine too if 8.1 is impracticle. Thing is I can only find CD versions of both OSes and this computer obviously doesn't have one of those. Is there a step by step way to format the drive and install one of these OSes via floppies? Any help is deeply appreciated. Thanks!

Mark

 

[Byrd]

The CD installer should have floppy disc images, with a few good 1.4MB floppy discs on hand you should be able to "sneaker net" the install on your CC.  Slow going but works alright.  When installed, duplicate the System Folder you have created into another folder, in case you hose/mess up the original install you can copy over the stock System Folder.

 

[feeef]

Hey Mark,

If you have another SCSI Mac with a CD Rom drive that would accept an extra SCSI drive, you can do the following :

Place your CC drive on your second Mac and erase it

Still on your second Mac, make a disk image of your install CD with diskcopy

Copy this disk image on your CC drive (hopefully it is large enough) and put this drive back on your CC

Now, you just need to find a bootable floppy and put diskcopy in it (it is very small). You boot your CC from the floppy, open you disk image and install.

Good luck!

 

[Mark2001]

Thanks guys. Unfortunately I don't have a SCSI CD mac. Only the Color Classic, Classic II, and a Powerbook G4 which I use to write stuff I download to disks the 68k macs can read.

Byrd, where in the installer ISO would I find floppy images? I can't seem to locate them. The only IMG files I've found are for Disk Tools.

Screen Shot 2014-11-14 at 7.42.07 AM by Mark.2000, on Flickr

 

[feeef]

I may be wrong but I think that only the disk tools images are on the CD. If you need the floppy version of the install, you will have to get it from somewhere.

Apple had some system 7 installs on their website but apparently removed the page.

I suggest you read this https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/24063-apple-older-software-downloads/ there are still some ways to get those file (but not for long I guess)