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bthylafh
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Ancient Mac

Wed Mar 26, 2008 11:25 am

I've got this Mac SE that I rescued. When powered up, it will display the Happy Mac face, then demand a bootable disk.

It's got a 20 meg SCSI hard drive, 1 meg of RAM, and an 800K floppy drive. I've got another not-as-old Mac (G3/333, System 9.2.2) for the time being, and I used it to format a standard 1.4 MB floppy disk as 800K (had to cover the extra hole), then used Disk Copy to copy the contents of the System 6.0.8 disk #2 (from Apple's archive) to it. When I try to boot the SE off this disk, it will quickly spit it back out and continue to demand a bootable disk.

I don't have the necessary tools to crack the case open.

Any suggestions to get this old thing working? It's just something to do in my spare time.

edit: I did try to clear the PRAM and that didn't help.
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derFunkenstein
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Re: Ancient Mac

Wed Mar 26, 2008 1:22 pm

There were (apparently) some models of the Macintosh SE that could read 1.44MB floppies, though the SE is werid:

1.) 800k SE's can't read 1.44MB disks, no matter if they're formatted as 800k
2.) 1.44MB SE's can't read 800k disks at all

The drives are only capable of reading disks of their native format. It's a total pain in the ass. And to make things better, the ROM *also* has to match the drive, so if you have an 800k SE, you can't just replace the drive with a 1.44MB drive. That's all info I pulled from Low-End Mac, and it sounds like a royal pain in the ass. Congrats on an SE, though...I love old computers, and old Macs are magical (I swear!)

edit: Nevermind, that was the Mac Plus. The SE is 800k only, and can only read 800k disks, not 1.44's formatted as 800k.
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BoBzeBuilder
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Re: Ancient Mac

Wed Mar 26, 2008 1:25 pm

What use do you have for that machine? My cellphone is faster than that.
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bthylafh
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Re: Ancient Mac

Wed Mar 26, 2008 3:40 pm

BoBzeBuilder wrote:
What use do you have for that machine? My cellphone is faster than that.


Run along, Junior. You'll understand when you're older.
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bthylafh
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Re: Ancient Mac

Wed Mar 26, 2008 3:47 pm

derFunkenstein wrote:
edit: Nevermind, that was the Mac Plus. The SE is 800k only, and can only read 800k disks, not 1.44's formatted as 800k.


Actually, my sources indicate that early SEs had either 1 or 2 800K drives, and the late ones might have a 1.4M drive.

That sucks about having to find actual low-density floppies; there was a box of them in storage with the computer, but they were all bad.
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bthylafh
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Re: Ancient Mac

Sun Aug 03, 2008 11:20 am

Since the spammer bubbled this back up: I just put that Mac up for my workplace's auction. I found a supply of 720K floppies that were still good, yet none of them would work either. Not worth the trouble.

Admin edit: He's talking about a spam post that has since been deleted... -- JBI
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