Powerbook 520c Idea

#1 Rhapsody

Mac Guru
I have 3 Powerbook 520c's that don't have working hard drives. I was wondering if I could make one into a digital calendar? Could I run completely off floppy? I have one IBM hd that will fit but it needs a different board.

Give me all of your questions, comments, and statements.
 
Yep you could run it off of a floppy easily, as long as your running something like System 7. I ran my PowerBook 1400 off of a floppy and it worked fine. Plus a calendar doesn't really take up any space at all. I would go for it.
 
The problem is that my PB requires System 7.1.1 or later. Can anyone recommend the System Software version and calender program?
 
Well, thats what I meant, System 7.1.1 is fine. As for a calendar program that runs on that old of systems, I don't know, so you'll have to google it.
 
The first version a Mac is shipped with is always a hardware specific build, so the best to do would be to find the install discs for that particular model of PowerBook - not any random 7.1.1.
Of system 7 I'd probably go with 7.6.1 but I don't remember offhand how much space that would take. If not that, then at least 7.5 - the engineering t-shirt for that update says it all.
 
I've installed the freely available 7.5.3 and then updated it to 7.5.5 with the updater from Apple. Runs very snappy and is relatively stable.
 
I've installed the freely available 7.5.3 and then updated it to 7.5.5 with the updater from Apple. Runs very snappy and is relatively stable.

Thats what I thought at first too, but it doesn't fit onto a floppy.

When I ran off of a disk, I used a disk recovery disk that had the system already installed on it.
 
I found a system 7.5.3 disc laying around and I took the system folder off of it and took out all the unnecessary stuff so its stripped down and it comes out to 3 MB. So in order to run off a disk you will have to have a system before that. I will look into earlier installers and post what I find, here.

EDIT:
So I found system 7.0.1, unfortunately I cannot find System 7.1 anywhere. So if you can find someway to update 7.0.1, heres the link.

Running on a disk with a calendar program doesn't seem possible at this point, it's probably best if you just put a new hard drive in. They are very cheap these days. You can buy one very cheap here.
 
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The powerbook 520 has a scsi port on it, if it is going to be fairly stationary, would it be possible to find an old scsi hardrive kicking around? if you found one that was like 250mb or 500mb then you could run 7.6.1 on it with all the extensions and have a good stable system to use for your calendar.
 
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