Mac SE help?

eric2006 · #1 August 17th, 2006, 12:20 PM

I was at a garage sale yesterday, looking through the tech section, when I saw it. A Mac SE, that looked to be in good condition. At 5 bucks, it's hard to go wrong. So, I brought it home and tinkered a bit when I noticed that there was no hard drive. Huh. Apparently, this is normal. Luckily, the OS is on a floppy, and there are two floppy drives. So, I have a few questions:

Is it possible to get a higher system than 5.3? I have access to a windows machine, and my mac only boots in OS X, and does not see the USB floppy drive.

Is it possible to get some form of internet on this puppy? Preferably through a LAN network?

Are there any cheap hard drives that I could put in this machine?

Are there any apps that would be fun to try out with this?

Thanks!

nixgeek · #2 August 17th, 2006, 01:02 PM

All the information you'll need for your Mac SE is here:

http://lowendmac.com/compact/se.shtml - Information on the Macintosh SE

http://www.jagshouse.com - All types of 68K Mac info, including how to get your 68K Mac on the Internet

http://pure-mac.com - Software for your Mac

http://home.earthlink.net/%7Egamba2/index.html - Gamba's website with links to various Mac OS System versions.

This is what I have done with my Quadra.

And here are more 68K Macs doing the same thing.

eric2006 · #3 August 17th, 2006, 01:45 PM

Do you know how I would go about getting software on the SE? The PC can only format as FAT32, and I don't think the SE can read that..

nixgeek · #4 August 17th, 2006, 01:49 PM

http://www.jagshouse.com/Macs_and_PCs.html

eric2006 · #5 August 17th, 2006, 03:07 PM

I'm trying to follow those instructions, but after I select the floppy, I get "Can't figure out how many sectors/tracks for this diskette".

nixgeek · #6 August 17th, 2006, 03:23 PM

What step are you on? Are you using WinImage or Rawrite?

eric2006 · #7 August 17th, 2006, 03:49 PM

Rawrite I'll try WinImage too. It could be that the 800k format is not supported on the USB floppy drive, but it can format it as FAT32 just fine on 800k disks..

nixgeek · #8 August 17th, 2006, 03:53 PM

Does the Mac SE have the letters FDHD or the word SuperDrive on it? If so, then it should be able to read the 1.4 MB diskettes.

For the record, "SuperDrive" was used back in the day to represent Mac diskette drives that could not only use both 800k and 1.4 MB diskettes, but could also read MS-DOS diskettes. This was because the Mac floppy disk drives used variable spinning while the PC floppy disk drives used fixed spinning. The SuperDrive I believe was able to do both.

EDIT:
My mistake.....the FDHD on the Macintosh SE means that it has a SuperDrive, although there were some that said "SuperDrive" on it that came out later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_SE