Tag Archives: CD

Electronics and Computers, Macintosh, Posts, System 7

CD-ROM Images for Booting a Macintosh from a 3rd Party CD-ROM Drive

CD-ROM Images for Booting a Macintosh from a 3rd Party CD-ROM Drive

Find in this page, disc images which when correctly burnt to a blank CD-R, will properly boot a Mac from a 3rd party (i.e. lacking an Apple ROM / not being an apple supported model) CD-ROM drive, including CD writers. This is a difficult thing to achieve, and has several difficulties, one of them is needing a CD that will allow it in the first place.

Generally, original Apple Installer CDs will boot a Mac even with a 3rd party drive, but a lot of images online have been… not extracted perfectly. This page contains a mixture of “fixed” images and original ones. Generally the original images are more broadly compatible, but I’ve done my best with my own!

Mac OS 7.6.1

This “fixed” image should boot most macs with a 32bit clean ROM, namely from the Macintosh IIci onwards. I haven’t tested, but CDs might work to machines as new as the Power Macintosh 9600.

Download Universal Booting Mac OS 7.6.1 (US)

Mac OS 7.5.3

This “fixed” disc image should boot most macs in the Macintosh Plus to Power Macintosh 9600 range.

Download Universal Booting Mac OS 7.5.3 (US)

Mac OS 8.1

This more heavily “fixed” disc image (the downloaded image had lost its drivers and had minor damage to the actual partition) should boot any Mac with a 68040, 601, 603 and 604 processor (plus machines which originally had these processors but were upgraded).

Download Universal Booting Mac OS 8.1 (US)

This is an original disc image which works perfectly. Thanks to fotWraith for providing the disc image.

Download Original Mac OS 8.1 (British)

Universal Installer CD

Placeholder. Image to follow.

This disc image should boot most macs in the Macintosh Plus to Power Macintosh 9600 range. The disc contains a compilation of installers for popular operating systems between 7.0 and 8.1.

<link to follow>

Beta Versions

The following Images have not been tested (likely because they are machine specific and I don’t have the required hardware).

Download PowerBook G3 Mac OS 8.1 (US)

Electronics and Computers, Macintosh, Posts

Five Disc Changer in a Classic Mac

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I childishly ordered a Nakamichi MJ-5.16, 5 disc SCSI CD-ROM changer from the US a few weeks back, not sure if it would work in my beige beasts. It arrived earlier today, so I popped it into my 9600 (after a false start where I forgot to set the SCSI ID). Other than the SCSI ID, no other jumpers were required for my setup, although there is a Termination option if required.

As expected, the drive wasn’t recognised by the stock Apple driver, so I dropped in the the 5.3.1 “works with almost everything” version, which recognised the drive and mounted the disk inserted into the first of the 5 positions only. This was promising, but not good enough, so I removed it and continued onwards.

The drive uses “LUN” to provide a number of sub devices under a single SCSI IDs. Macs have supported this since SCSI Manager 4.3 and the Quadra 840av, but it doesn’t appear to have been implemented in many drivers, so I set about testing every driver I could find. After a couple of hours I finally found that the drive fully worked with FWT CDT 4, specifically after installing the Jukebox optional software.

The software gives a few options and an extra menu next to the Applications Menu and seems to work exactly as required.

The only issue is that ejecting 5 discs takes a couple of minutes and is quite an involved process!

The strangest thing about this drive is that they can be bought at reasonable prices, despite being a bit of a novelty, even though SCSI drives usually demand a premium. Sadly the listing I got mine from is gone and alternatives are double the price. Happy hunting.