I recently acquired a SCSI2SD adapter to replace a failing SCSI drive from the 1990s, so thought I’d document some of the options I’ve found for initializing and partitioning bootable drives for classic Macintosh systems.
Author: Steve
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Creating a bootable hard drive starting with a image file and an emulator
With SCSI being essentially obsolete, and the fact that Macintosh systems (since OS X 10.6 I think) can no longer write to HFS formatted disks, the best way to use modern systems when setting up your classic 68k system is to create a bootable disk image using a Macintosh 68k or PowerPC emulator then writing […]
SCSI on Windows 10 64-bit: Adaptec AHA-2940 (29xx) Ultra, AIC-7870 (78xx), or 29320LPE Ultra 320
When I first started playing with 68k macintosh systems around 1999/2000 (a Macintosh Plus) I connected an external SCSI drive to my Windows 98 system and was able to use an early version of Basilisk II with SCSI pass-through to format the hard drive. Now 18 years later, SCSI is an obsolete technology, and in general […]
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Using Basilisk II
You probably know what Basilisk II is, but if not, a quick summary: Basilisk II (manual)is an open source emulator for 68k-based Macintosh computers that support 32bit memory (therefore you can NOT boot System 6 under Basilisk, but you can setup System 6 on a secondary drive image, see Section 5) that runs on Windows, OS […]
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Using a SCSI2SD adapter
I recently purchased a SCSI2SD V.5 adaptor (3.5″ and 2.5″) to replace a failing 1980s SCSI HD, and realized once I had it set up I could “image” the Micro-SD card to make boot-able images anyone could use.
Mac OS Standard Format Specifications (Apple KB Article 8647)
This is a copy of Apple Knowledge Base Article 8647 taken from the internet archive, this article explains the various limits for partition sizes, and number of files under different versions of the OS Before discussing hard drive block allocation, and the intricacies of determining allocation block sizes and such, let’s first review the Macintosh […]
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh: using a 100MB SCSI Iomega Zip Drive
I’ve recently been experimenting to see if I could somehow use of my old Iomega Zip drives (a 250MB USB version, and a 100MB SCSI) to move files between my Windows PC and my various 68k Macintosh Systems. After a bit of experimentation I discovered how I could not only move files, but also create […]
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Using a 3.5″ HD Floppy Drive
Booting your classic 68k Macintosh from a 3.5 inch floppy disk was the most common and the easiest way to get most classic macs working when your starting with a more modern machine (most, but not all, more on that in a bit). This post focuses on 3.5″ High Density (HD) disks that can be created […]
Macintosh System Enablers for OS 7.1 to 7.5.5: Current Versions and Change History
The information in this post was taken from an the Apple knowledge base (TA28948) with the assumption that the source article may be removed in the future (like many other articles that dealt with the vintage systems). I have updated the table to link to copies of the System Enablers that are currently being hosted […]
Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh – Selecting your System Software
As I mentioned in my Setting up your vintage (classic) 68k Macintosh a lot of the supporting information that used to be on Apple’s knowledge base about their older systems has slowly been disappearing. So I’ve decided to capture some of the key information I found useful in this blog. Starting with which Macintosh 68k […]