I have a ton of experience reformatting and refreshing old PC's . My experience with vintage macs is ...lacking.
My current performas CD drive does not appear to be working but ive read that it could be a software issue as i have taken it a apart and its clean as a whistle and it DOES read audio cd's track info and song lengths .... it just wont play them.
So to the point. I want to do the Mac equivelent of just wiping and reformatting this sucker to get a fresh from the factory experience. BUT im worried there is a chance the CD drive might not work so i want to go the Floppy route. i have the 7.5 install disks and the network disk as well as the disk tools disk i made from images offline.
Could someone explain to me how i should go about this , and how not to blow this beautiful little computer up ? lol
Thanks !!
It sounds like you have the disks alread made? If you're concerned about the disks, you could insert them in the Mac and try manually copying the contents, ust to make sure they drive and thei disks are reading correctly. Before erasing, make sure you can boot from the installer disk and go as far into the install process as practical. Boot off disk tools and reformat the disk with Drive Setup, then boot up the installer.
And really, get that AAUI transceiver. You're going to want this networked.
hey buddy thanks for the reply. So yeah i have written all the disks i think i would need. System install disks,network disk and disk tools. and i have all verified they already work. The system is running fine with its current OS. 7.5 and is completely usable. Infact i used the disks to Re-install the operating system once already but it didnt wipe any of the old data and i can still see this old ladies documents on there lol. I just want to know how to boot it from floppy disk ... and then install a completely fresh version of 7.5 on it . like you would do with dos or windows on a pc. So it is a completely fresh install like from the factory . I have tried to boot from floppy by holding down different combinations of buttons and i havent gotten anywhere. It just keeps loading into the OS like normal .
At startup, it will read the floppy drive, boot off it if it's bootable, and eject it if it's not. You don't have to hold down any keys. Is it ejecting the disk?
You could try the 7.5.3 set from download.info.apple.com
Ok, so i got it figured it out. You know what the problem was ? Me . lol. Coming from working on old PC/IBM's i was just massively overthinking it . It was so easy my brain just couldnt accept it . OK ...well cool. thanks for the help. One thing though im finding is the hobbiest side of things with old macintosh computers is so much smaller than with PC's . Its REALLY hard to find any solid walkthroughs or guides on this stuff, at least from what i could tell. Its a shame as i think the vintage mac scene is going to pick up alot soon. anyway thanks again . Case closed.
If you want to write walkthroughs as you learn, we'll publish them here.
cool , good to know thank you .
If I remember correctly, your Performa 6115CD was the "consumer" version of my old PowerMac 6100/60:
I purchased one of these back in the mid-1990s to use at my office for all of my Mac needs AND...
It had an internal add-on board that allowed me to run MSDOS*, and in those days, when I had spare time at the office I used to interactively play others in the card game Hearts on America OnLine's MSDOS*-only version software!
*Or am I forgetting and was it an early version of Windows that ran on that card installed into that Mac?!?
Everymac tells me: "The PC Compatible version also shipped with a 66 MHz 486DX2 processor-equipped NuBus card that can have a maximum of 32 MB of RAM dedicated to the DOS/Windows operating system."