I rescued an SE once that had the same issue. The hard drive was suffering from "sticktion". I removed the drive, then held it in my hand palm down, with the drive parallel to the ground and twisted my hand back and forth to loosen up the platters inside. Worked! If this machine sits too long I have to do it again.
Gary On Dec 8, 2:09 am, Gregg Eshelman <[email protected]> wrote: > --- 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. ;) -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/
