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Mac Daniel's Advice

Rehabilitating an Old School Quadra

Dan Knight - 2002.09.23

I recently saved a local school the expense of paying someone to haul away their old Macs - mostly LC 630 DOS Compatibles along with a good number of assorted LCs and Quadra 605s.

One of my sons helped me haul several dozen old Macs, an almost equal number of monitors, a bunch of power cords, and a smattering of ADB mice and keyboards home. We counted over 40 Macs, but we have no idea how many work or how many are missing components. We do know that some are missing CD-ROMs, hard drives, floppies, and even RAM.

Out of roughly two dozen 630s, I'm hoping to piece together at least a dozen computers with 20-24 MB RAM (digging into my own stash), a floppy drive, a CD-ROM, and 4 MB on the DOS card. These will be set up with System 7.5.5, the latest version of the Mac OS Apple allows us to freely use, and DOS 6.22 on the PC side, the version of MS-DOS that shipped with the computers.

I won't be installing Windows on these machines. Although 3.11 came with these machines, Y2K issues make it obsolete. I will investigate DOS browsers and GUI alternatives to Windows. More on that when I get around to that half of the DOS Compatible.

Getting Started

The first issue I had to deal with was a program called OnGuard that locks students out of things like Extensions Manager and the Startup Disk control panel. You can do an end run around OnGuard by booting from a CD-ROM - and probably a floppy as well, although I haven't tried that.

I promised to remove any school labels and wipe all the files from the hard drives, so after I figured out how to work around OnGuard, I boosted memory from 12 MB to 24 and attached one of my external SCSI drives to the 630, booting into Mac OS 8.1. Then I used Drive Setup to format the computer's internal hard drive.

Next I copied the 19 install files for System 7.5.3 and the 7.5.5 update to the external drive, installed 7.5.3, and updated it to 7.5.5. Booting into System 7.5.x and seeing it rebuild the desktop on each and every partition reminded me that some Extensions and Control Panels really should be disabled.

Disable Control Panels: Cache Switch, Launcher, Macintosh Easy Open, and Screen. Disabled Extensions: any printers I don't own.

Network Problem Solved

The oddest thing happened. In OS 8.1, I could connect to our home network using the Comm Slot ethernet card in the 630; under 7.5.x, no such luck. Back to 8.1. Time to do some research.

I looked at the ethernet card. It appeared to be an Apple card, but the Apple drivers weren't working with it. I found and installed the latest version of Open Transport for System 7, rebooted, and saw that nothing had changed.

I finally posted my problem on Quadlist, and John Teffer posted a solution within 90 minutes. His posting:

I had a similar problem when I did a clean install of 7.5.5 on my Quadra 630 with Comm Slot ethernet card. Mine was not an Apple card though, there were no obvious manufacturer's marks on it. I couldn't get the ethernet card to work with the fresh system folder and of course I had thrown the previous system folder away already.

My problem was solved when I checked the Mac Driver Museum's network page:

http://www.macdrivermuseum.com/network.shtml

I looked at the chips on the card, and the names of the drivers, and found a match. The biggest chip on the card said "Sonic", and there was a driver from "Sonic Systems". The installer recognized my card, and the day was saved.

I pulled the card, noticed the Sonic name on one of the chips, downloaded the Sonic driver on the above page, installed it, rebooted System 7.5.5, and was finally able to connect the our home network and the outside world.

Planning Ahead

My goal is to set these up as low cost systems for people who don't have computers. I'll be looking for freeware apps to install, such as Emailer Lite, iCab, and WordPerfect, and I'll also include a 14" color monitor, mouse, and keyboard. If I can find Comm Slot modems on the cheap, I may pull the ethernet cards.

I'm looking into alternatives to DOS and Windows for the DOS card, but don't know just where that will end up. It's a long time since I've done anything more with DOS or Windows than install 'em on a computer someone else was going to use.

Once that's all figured out and set up, I'll create a master set of files on one partition on my external drive and use that to clone the main setup on the remaining 630 DOS Compatibles.

Next time: Browsing the Web with Old School Quadras.

Not sure if you should upgrade your old Mac or replace it? Check the Mac Daniel index to see if we've already addressed your problem.

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