[NBLUG/talk] Attempting an "ancient hardware" install...

Walter Hansen gandalf at sonic.net
Fri Feb 20 10:23:00 PST 2004


Cool. I'd like to know how this turns out. The SE does have a SCSI
connector on the back and you can easily plug in a hard drive to it. A
CD-ROM might be a bit more difficult as I remember (I had problems getting
them to work). It's expandable to 4 megs, but you'll need to cut a wire on
the motherboard. It takes 1 meg 30 pin sims (ether eight or nine chip). It
also should have an internal 20meg SCSI drive. You might want to just take
the drive out and install the files on them, or even put something bigger
in. I'm sure you can pick up a 500meg SCSI drive at CRC for a buck or two.


> I want to (try to) breathe some new life into an Apple Macintosh SE by
> installing Linux on it.  Not surprisingly, I have run into a few
> complications.
>
>
> First, as far as I can tell, I can install Debian Linux (m68k build) on
> it, but it has no CD-ROM drive and its built-in 3.5" floppy drive only
> supports 720K diskettes.
>
> I seem to remember that I can format a 1.44MB diskette as a 720K
> diskette and then use it on a machine that only recognizes 720K
> diskettes, but I'm not sure exactly how to do so (I've formatted and
> used high-density 5.25" 1.2MB disks as low-density 360K disks before).
> However, all of my attempts to do so have failed; I cannot use my Athlon
> system (running Debian/testing) to format a high-density disk as a
> low-density disk (and then be able to read it back), and I cannot even
> make the Macintosh (which still has MacOS 7 installed) read or even
> format a high-density disk.  Am I doing something wrong, or do I need to
> find a 720K floppy drive (with a few 720K floppy disks) to install into
> my Athlon box?
>
>
> There is a small chance that I will bring this computer to the
> InstallFest tomorrow, depending on whether I can make usable boot
> floppies by then.
>
> --
> Lincoln Peters <sampln at sbcglobal.net>
>
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