Disk swapping. Anyone who ever owned an Amiga or Atari ST will remember the pain of swapping disks. We only had standard density drives (837kb or 880kb on Amiga) so there was a lot of it. Or so I thought.
The Mac does not have a working hard disk so everything is done on floppy disks. And I mean, EVERYTHING. Never have so few swapped so many disks for so little result. Even ejecting a disk results in it requesting the same disk back again because it needs to know what to do after it has ejected a disk.
Typically, trying to view the contents of another floppy after booting from a system floppy will result in 15-20 swaps. Yes, really. This Mac MUST get a working hard disk.
Fortunately I have some spare SCSI hard disks in my box of bits. They're more modern than the broken 40Mb drive and a bit bigger (9Gb or 36Gb). But there's a problem. The software I have on the tools disk will only 'see' apple supplied hard disks. This was, in true apple style, to get you to buy their drives. No problem. I shall download alternative software. Except it's not as simple as that.
Programs for early Macs can be downloaded in a variety of formats. Most include some form of compression (StuffIt or similar) but the way they handle data is completely different to PC disks. So I can download the program but there's no easy way to copy it to a Mac floppy. I tried copying one to a PC floppy then copying the file to the system disk and running it there. After about 50 disk swaps (I shit yee not) it copied OK only for the Mac to say it couldn't read the file.
I tried a flaky program that converts files as it copies them to a Mac floppy. This required me to format a Mac floppy. Disk swap hell again....but at least the program seemed to transfer successfully on my PC to the Mac formatted disk.
More disk swap nightmares. Only to be told that the file couldn't be opened. Rinse. Repeat.
I was on the verge of giving up until I found a program that, when copied using the flaky app to convert files to Mac format, had a more sensible file name. It ended with .sea or Self Extracting Appplication. This was promising. I put the disk in the Mac (cue more disk swaps) and then then ran the program. More disk swaps. Then a window appeared asking where to install the program. There was no choice, it had to install back to the system floppy disk. More disk swaps. Then a message the disk is full. I was short by 33Kb. My home address is longer than 33Kb.
This time, the Mac came close to becoming airborne.
After a lie down I began to google again and found that Apple's software could be patched to allow it to look at any SCSI drive. I duly downloaded the software, copied it to a Mac formatted floppy. It worked! It fitted on a bare bones boot disk with a couple of hundred Kb to spare. Now to get the patch.
This was another long and tedious session of downloading one file, finding it was in .sit format (a whole other ballache - some StuffIt archives don't work with newer versions, most don't seem to bloody work at all) then rejecting it. Finally, one chap had a webpage where I copied the text from the page, renamed it to .hqx (don't ask) and then copied it to the Mac floppy. Miracle of miracles, it worked and I had a .sea app sat on the floppy.
Into the Mac, more disk swapping. Open the disk, more disk swapping. Run the patch file, more disk swapping. More disk swapping. And some more. Even more. By this point I thought Steve Jobs was having a laugh from beyond the grave. Then, it happened. "Patch successfully applied." Get in!
So, to re-cap. Mac Classic II software is a nightmare. It is a complete pain in the arse from start to finish.
Anyway. I have 36Gb drives and 9Gb drives. I connected up a 36Gb drive and started up on my patched system disk. Success! The software recognised the drive and began to format it.
It took about three hours in total to format, then verify the format of the drive. One thing I noticed that I wasn't too keen on was that the hard drive got rather warm. In fact, it was almost too hot to touch. I'm not sure if this means the drive is faulty or if that would be its natural 'state'. Either way, it was too hot to go into the case of the Mac.
Fortunately, I also had the 9Gb drive from HP. I swapped everything over, waited about an hour and this drive was done and was also considerably cooler. Nice one. In she goes. :)
First problem. Setting up the partitions I set the first one to 4Gb and then tried to install the OS. Ooops. This was obviously too big as it complained I had -3177783Mb free on my hard disk which was clearly insufficient to install the few megabytes of System 7.0.1.
Re-partition to 2Gb and try again. This time, no complaints and within half an hour I was staring at a hard disk installed version with NO DISK SWAPS! YYYYEEEEESSSSS!!!
Now all I need to do is install some more useful things....
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| Finally! An end to disk swapping! |
It took about three hours in total to format, then verify the format of the drive. One thing I noticed that I wasn't too keen on was that the hard drive got rather warm. In fact, it was almost too hot to touch. I'm not sure if this means the drive is faulty or if that would be its natural 'state'. Either way, it was too hot to go into the case of the Mac.
Fortunately, I also had the 9Gb drive from HP. I swapped everything over, waited about an hour and this drive was done and was also considerably cooler. Nice one. In she goes. :)
First problem. Setting up the partitions I set the first one to 4Gb and then tried to install the OS. Ooops. This was obviously too big as it complained I had -3177783Mb free on my hard disk which was clearly insufficient to install the few megabytes of System 7.0.1.
Re-partition to 2Gb and try again. This time, no complaints and within half an hour I was staring at a hard disk installed version with NO DISK SWAPS! YYYYEEEEESSSSS!!!
Now all I need to do is install some more useful things....
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