Macintosh System Compilations, System 7.0 to Mac OS 8.1

Based on the Anthology DVDs that Apple made available in 1999, I extracted as many system installers as I could fit on a single CD, for one region. First of all for UK versions, but then for the US and the International installers. Where I couldn’t find an installer I tried to fill the gaps, mostly with the International versions.

I put each of these region based compilations onto a CD iso disk image after adding a bootable copy of System 7.5.5. Hopefully these will be helpful to get people up and running. You just need to burn the image directly to a CD. I recommend burning the CD at the slowest speed you can tolerate, on a quality brand CD-R. Also, if your old Mac has trouble reading the disk, try dismantling the drive and cleaning the lens as roughly described here. Note that the CD should (but might not, as I don’t have the hardware to test) boot any machine between a Macintosh Plus (with 4MB of RAM) and a 9600. It might not be able to boot some 5400, 6400, 8600 and 9600 variants (although it shouldn’t boot my 9600/350 and does). It also wont boot in most third party drives.

I had to make a new HFS Standard image for the 8.1 updater, as the original was HFS Extended… which was stupid because it meant you needed 8.1 or newer to mount it, making it extremely difficult to actually use!

The installers seem to be all Disk Copy images, but note that an older copy of Disk Copy is claiming ownership of the files. To overcome this, look in the Utilities folder and there is a newer copy of Disk Copy 6.x in a folder there, along with a number of other useful recover / maintenance / troubleshooting utilities.

For the UK :

http://elephantandchicken.co.uk/downloads/Brit%20Mac%20OS%207%20to%208.1%20(755).zip

For the US :

http://elephantandchicken.co.uk/downloads/US%20Mac%20OS%207%20to%208.1%20(755).zip

and the International version :

http://elephantandchicken.co.uk/downloads/Int%20Mac%20OS%207%20to%208.1%20(755).zip