Need to boot healthy 500MB HD in Quadra 800

[gbatch1]

Can someone help me? I've been using a Quadra 605 (running System

7.6.1) for 13 yrs in my music project studio. My hard drive crashed

last week so I need to reconstruct my setup. I have everything backed

up on zip disks, so I bought a Quadra 800 on ebay. It works

perfectly, but it was running system 7.1, so I tried to trade System

Folders to use 7.6.1 instead, but I must not have had the right System

Enabler for the Quadra 800, so when I restarted - it won't boot, AND I

don't have the right startup "disk tools" floppy for it. I can't get

it to boot from the Zip drive, even though I had the zip connection

(SCSI) working perfectly.

I guess I need to somehow buy a Quadra 800 - 7.x boot floppy from

someone, and then get the right enabler so as to be able to get it

morphed to 7.6.1.

I have tried to create a Disk Tools startup floppy with my old machine, but whatever floppy I put in the drive pops out right after I see the happy Mac icon.

Any help would be deeply appreciated. - - - Gary

 

[beachycove]

It sounds to me that you might need to "bless" the system folder - for which, see Google on the subject if necessary. System 7.6.1 does not require machine-specific system enablers - they were no longer necessary, in fact, after System 7.5.

 

[gbatch1]

Thanks - I read that stuff about "blessing" the System Folder. It tells me I need to insert the "Boot Disk". Unfortunately, what Boot Disks I do have pop out of the floppy drive as soon as the happy Mac icon appears. I wonder how to get a Boot Disk that will agree to boot up a Quadra 800 that was running System 7.1. After one attempt, I got an error mesage that basically said that this machine can't run on 7.1, and I needed to insert a later version's boot disk. I don't really care what system's boot disk is needed to get the Hard Drive open because, once I get it open,

I can reposition the system stuff and be on my way. I'm wondering if it's some sort of timing sequence thing . . . .

I'm starting to think that I need to find a local old mac guru store/person who has a stack of old boot disks for the various Quadras/Performas/Centris/LC68040s and just keep trying different ones until the machine agrees to boot up ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

I have a good copy of system 7.6.1 in a folder on my zip disk, but I'm sure it is way too large to fit on a floppy. I'm not sure how to trim away the surplus stuff to just get the bare bones critical stuff.

THANKS !!!!

 

[beachycove]

System 7.5.3 is a free download from Apple:

http://www.info.apple.com/support/oldersoftwarelist.html#system

As that is all of 19 disks and thus an overkill, however, and assuming that you need merely to boot the machine in order to "bless" that folder, I'd recommend that you download the "System Enabler 040" from the same site and pop it into your 7.1 Disk Utility floppy disk's system folder. The Q800 should boot from that altered floppy.