--- On Tue, 12/7/10, Qbit <[email protected]> wrote:
> I just got my first MAC! Rescued it
> from going to surplus. When I
> connect the keyboard and mouse and power it up, it stops at
> a disk
> image with a question mark. Can anyone give me advice on
> what this means.
It means you need a bootable 800K floppy disk. The easiest way to get one going
is for someone to mail you some floppies to work with, with the software
already on them.
It takes a Macintosh from before the iMac era to write to 800K disks.
There are some other methods, an Amiga computer with a Catweasel floppy
controller and software can do the job. There have also been Catweasel floppy
controllers for PCs, several versions to keep up with changing technology. The
old Central Point Option Board may have been able to read and write 400K and
800K Mac floppies. (But good luck finding, or using one. There never was any
Windows support for it.)
Still the easiest and cheapest method is another 68k CPU Macintosh with a 1.44M
floppy drive and a stack of PC formatted 720K disks to reformat as 800K Mac
disks.
Does it have two floppy slots or is one blocked off? If one is blocked off
there may be a hard drive in it.
What would make it way easier is if it's the SE FDHD (Floppy Drive High
Density) model with 1.44M floppy drive.
Uncompressed 1.44M Mac disk images can be written on a PC using WinImage or
RAWRITE. For compressed disk images I use the Basilisk II 68k Mac emulator and
Apple's Disk Copy.
If your SE doesn't have a 1.44M drive, save your self a bunch of time and
sanity and get to looking for something like a Mac IIci or IIsi. ;)
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