Installing System 6.0.8 from disk images

[crimsonRE]

Hi folks - my first post as a new foot soldier in the MLA.

I have an SE inherited from my sister-in-law that has a nice roomy 250mb HD. She got this, i believe, on warranty when the original drive died, but she switched to a different computer at that time (way back when). So no OS was present on it. I had some boxes of floppies (nearly all 800k!) from my 2 first years in college - 1984 to 1986! So this was all System 6 and earlier stuff - but all copied in a very haphazard fashion : we were never provided any nice install disks for use with the school's 128k, Fat Macs, and, later on, SE's (and oh, the floppy games we played in order to get some things done). Thus I've ended up with (other than disks with version 3 & 4 & 5 System/Finder/etc files!) an incomplete copy of System 6. Thus I'm apparently missing some components that would allow me to connect to my Appletalk servers: a PowerMac 7200 with OS9.0 and another SE with System 7.0 (but a miniscule 20mb HS). I have the Chooser, and AppleShare, but when trying to use it to the OS tells me I'm missing components.

So I have downloaded the 800kb disk images (4 images) of 6.0.8 from the Apple older software page. I unarchived these bin's with Stuffit 5.1.4 on the 7200, and copied the resulting .sea files (via Appletalk) to 800k floppies using the System 7 SE's floppy drive. And thus was able to finally get these onto the System 6 SE.

However, when these files extract themselves I end up with still just 4 monolithic files - and the System 6 OS says it doesn't know what to do with these files ("the application for using this is missing"). I was rather expecting to end up with 4 folders containing the various bits of System 6.0.8.

Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong? What should I be seeing after after the .sea's unpack themselves?

 

[crimsonRE]

As a postscript, I would like to say that I do plan to put System 7.x on this SE with the roomy HD. However, I would like to have a full working copy of System 6 first (& be able to flip back and forth by blessing/unblessing the 2 System Folders).

 

[beachycove]

Maybe someone who has made a set of instaaltion disks from those images nore recently than me will remember better, as it has been years in my case, but I would expect to be able to boot from the 'Install Me First' disk/ Disk 1/ whatever it's called and do the install from floppy.

Did you make the floppies just by dragging the files onto the disks, or from the disk images using the Apple program Disk Copy? The latter is what I would expect to have to do. Your 7200 most likely has it on there, and will make the requisite floppies just fine.

 

[PowerPup]

Yes, once you've extracted the .sea archives what you are left with are DiskCopy floppy images. You'll need to use DiskCopy to make the 4 floppies from the images. (There's a "make a floppy" command in the Utilities menu.)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Welcome aboard, glad you joined us. :beige:

 

[krye]

Exactly. Those .sea files extract to DiskCopy images. You're almost there!

 

[crimsonRE]

Many thanks for all the replies - good to see a fair few folk still hanging out here and willing to share their knowledge!

Very good, I found DiskCopy 4.2 that runs under System 7.0 and was able to mount the image files and create 800k floppies. I do indeed now have a installable set of 6.0.8. I'll do the install this evening (I hope), and then move on to System 7 - I picked up boxed editions of 7.1 and 7.5 at a library sale some years, as well as Acrobat 5 (licensed!), StuffIt Deluxe 4.1, Symantec C++, and White Pine eXodus (X server for System 7.x) - the latter of which dovetails nicely with my previous GUI experience...

I was in the IT industry from 1989-2005, as a db admin/programmer, using Sun servers running Solaris 1 and 2.x (I happened to have begun using Unix - Research Version 6 - while in high school, on a PDP-11). So most of my background has been in UNIX. Even my computer at home was a SPARCstation IPC running SunOS 4.1.4 that I bought in 1993. Then I began collecting older UNIX-based workstations starting around 2001 - Sun, SGI, and NeXT, all networked (10B-2, 10B-T) in my basement computer room. Fun days, the Golden Age of collecting these machines.

I have missed the Golden Age for the Macintosh 680x0 and early PPC machines but I'm willing to sacrifice a few more dollars to gather some up. Shipping does leaven the joy somewhat....$80 total for my 7200/120 (with PC card, I'll play with that someday). Great fun pulling out my boxes of Mac software from college - actually I've discovered they're mostly 400k disks (the 7200 with MacOS 9.0 likes none of these - MFS, I imagine). And discovering LocalTalk/AppleTalk has been a great boon, allowing me to get the SE's connected to the outside world via the 7200.

Cheers,

crimsonRE