8-Bit Guy
Retro Man Cave
LGR
Cameron Gray
These guys have inspired me to go back and do a bit of retro computing of my own. Here's a story about one of my recent adventures in retro computing.
I've had an ongoing challenge that has made me want to get an old Macintosh computer back up and running, my wife's collection of Macintosh 3.5" floppy disks contain data spanning from the late 80s into the early 90s, including all her files from her college years. We had an old PowerBook computer, but it was stolen some years and with it I lost the ability to access these 400k and 800k floppy disks.
Chapter 1: Rosetta Stone Mac
Some time ago, as I was reading up on this topic, I found this page on the Internet, Working with Macintosh Floppy Disks in the New Millennium. This article was incredibly helpful, listing in general all the ways that I could go about retrieving the data from these disks. At first, I was most interested in the KryoFlux disk controller because I'm really impressed by the engineering effort, and I like the idea of being able to use new hardware to access old software, but it seemed alot of money to pay for a one-use hardware design. I found the idea of a "Rosetta Stone" Mac quite intriguing. I had forgotten that before Apple's Super Drive that could burn both CDs and DVDs, they had the original Super Drive that could read both PC and Mac floppies, and these Macs had those floppies. I didn't know that much about this era of Macintosh, because although I was an Apple II user in High School, and a Mac user after college, during my college years I didn't spent much time with Apple computers. I did some research on the Internet, and the Rosetta Stone Mac seem to be making a bit of a recovery in terms of their value, with some systems going on eBay in the $200 to $300 price range (in 2019). So, I also put this idea on the "back burner" and waited.
Recently, I discovered a new store in Minneapolis about a mile and a half from my house called "Free Geek". Although this is a non-profit organization I believe it is a franchise because I've seen YouTubers visiting stores of the same name in other cites. On one of my first visits, I saw a couple of examples of the last of the Beige Macintosh computers sitting on a back shelf. These had been gone over by the technicians, and had Mac OS 9 installed on them, the last of the Classic Mac OS'es. I didn't put two and two together until my second visit, when I remembered that I had a "Rosetta Stone" Macintosh on my wish list. I was able to pick up a working Power Macintosh 8600/200 for just $85. This computer was a PCI based architecture, with SCSI hard drives, but it also had a Firewire and USB card installed, along with 10 Base T Ethernet, so I had alot of options for getting data on and off of the computer.
Once I got the computer at home, I did have some trouble getting it to boot reliably. Apparently there is a shortage of these SCSI hard drives, and the 2GB Quantum drive was beginning to show it's 20 year old age. After opening the case and reseating the SCSI connectors and RAM, I was able to get the device to boot and recover all the data off the floppy disks that were readable. It looks like we lost about 1/3 of the disks completely, and a couple of files were corrupted on the other disks, but I think this is too be expected after so many years. Mission Accomplished!
Chapter 2: SCSI2SD
The story is not over. I just couldn't put the computer back into storage knowing that the hard drive was on its last leg, so I started reading up on methods for replacing SCSI hard drives on these classic computers. It turns out that there's another modern day hardware engineering solution for this problem, SCSI2SD, which allows the user to replace a failing SCSI hard drive with a modern MicroSD memory card of significantly greater capacity. I learned about how other vintage apple users had been able to use this device, and so I ordered one for myself.
Getting this to work was a bit of a chore, and I won't bore you with the details of all the rabbit trails I went down, but I will detail the route that worked for me in hope that it will help someone else out. Before I start into the detail, I should provide some background about the modern computer tools I used to get this going. First, a computer with a CD Burner is required to get the Mac OS Boot Disk made. I also found it critical to use the USB 3.5" Floppy Disk drive that I'd had in storage for some years attached to my modern computer. Although my computer is a Hackintosh, I believe that a PC or Linux box would be equally useful for these setup tasks.
I initially tried to get the SCSI2SD and dying Quantum SCSI drive working at the same time, but I was not able to make that happen. I think we were just in time and the HDD is now completely non-functional, but I'll leave it inside the Mac just in case it can be repaired in future.
The first goal for the SCSI2SD computer was to get the unit working as a boot drive. The configuration utility allows setting the SCSI parameters, and I found a good deal of useful information on the web. Here's instructions on how to configure SCSI2SD to emulate the original 40MB drive used in the earliest Macs. Unfortunately, that won't help us because 40MB isn't enough space for Mac OS 9. I ended up setting up Two 2GB partitions on the SD card I had (that consumes 2 SCSI IDs).
MacOS 9.1 is the latest version that will run on the 8600 hardware, according to the link above from EveryMac.com. Apple made that software a free download, but they are no longer host the files, which you can find hosted here. I downloaded and burned this CD to disk. The disk boots well, but this is where we hit another snag...
The default Apple Hard Disk utilities on the Mac OS Boot CD for formatting drives will not format Non-Apple drives to use as a System Boot Disk. I wish there was a way for me to read back the SCSI parameters for my sometimes working drive and enter those parameters into the SCSI2HD software. If that was possible, then the default Apple HD utility would work, but after much web searching on the topic, I was not able to figure that out and gave up. If you know the SCI parameters for a 2GB Apple branded hard drive, please leave a comment below, or alternately, if you know of a software utility that would allow me to extract that information from my drive, please also put that in the comments. Once I shifted away from that technique, I was left looking for a 3rd party utility that could be used to format the hard drive during a boot from a Mac OS System Disk. On this web page, I found mention of this utility, LIDO, and a download link to the Macintosh Repository. This Utility fits on a Floppy Disk, so the OS install procedure must be modified a bit.
Boot from the Mac OS 9.1 Install CD. Instead of using the default Mac OS Hard Disk Utility, insert the floppy disk with LIDO on it, and run LIDO instead. Use LIDO to initialize the drive, then go back to the Mac OS Install program, and it should pick back up from there, format the drive, and set it up as bootable. The installer did pop up a warning about the version of the Hard Disk Driver being out of date, but that has not affected the system's ability to boot or run from the drive.
That was it! After that, the system boots and runs.
Chapter 3: Finishing Touches and Moving Forward
The last things I wanted to do before putting the Mac away was get a good hardware mounting system worked out. The SCSI2SD web page pointed out this 3D printed bracket that someone designed. Since I do not have a 3D printer, I ordered that here. Unfortunately, I was not able to find this in the Beige color that matches the outside of the Mac, but I'll keep all the faceplates. There's no spare 3.5" drive bay available, so I found a low-cost off the shelf 5.25" to 3.5" drive bay adapter at my local Micro Center and superglued these two black plastic parts together. With the SCSI2SD bolted down to the 3D printed bracket, and with the 5.25" adapter bolted into the tower we can now access the USB programming port and the MicroSD card slot from the front of the machine without opening the case.
For another $10 or $20 dollars, I found an external Firewire CF Card Reader. This is how I move updates, games, and large files back and forth from the Classic Mac, although I should also investigate some Ethernet networking, as I believe that can be made to work as well.
Steve's Power Macintosh 8600 / 200
The drives shown on the front from top to bottom are:
3.5" Super Drive Floppy Disk
CD-ROM Drive
100MB Zip Drive
SCSI2SD Drive
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