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Acquired: Mac IICi

offensive_Jerk

offensive_Jerk

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Joined
Jul 13, 2009
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Location
Wisconsin
My buddy in a neighboring city acquired a fine Mac iiCi unit from the thrift.

Hopefully I can pic it up tonight.
$20 for the CPU, monitor, KB, and mouse.
No idea if it works.

I think there is some yellowing issues with the system. Never played around with the older Macs. Should be a learning experience.
Here is a picture of it at the store.

Any input/comments/concerns?
:confused:


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Nice little find. Older Macs are great little machines to tinker with. This one has a superdrive so if it doesn't have an OS, you should be able to create a boot disc even on a PC. There's an executable floating around the net that makes a System 7.5 floppy on a PC. Also, try looking for HFS Explorer. It should allow you to work with disc images and can read and write Mac formatted floppies. An external scsi Zip Drive is also a great tool to get one going.
 
Someone may have paid around $10,000 for that setup - and now it's yours for 20.
 
GEM/2 said:
Someone may have paid around $10,000 for that setup - and now it's yours for 20.
Click to expand...

I do find that humorous.
Anyway, got the infamous ? symbol upon boot. Apparently the system file is unreadable?

Currently Trying to find a boot disk for this thing.
 
Nice systems, I have a couple IIci/IIcx units. The question mark means there is nothing it can boot from (CDROM, HD, floppy, etc). There are images of OS 7.01 on Apples site you can turn into floppies and boot the unit. Is there a HD installed?
 
Yes there is an HD installed.

Some sites stated that the battery could cause this. The battery does appear to be depleted according to my multimeter.

Seems wierd to me that no battery would cause it to not boot. I understand why it would happen on a PC but don't know anything about these old macs.

Hopefully I can find a new bat.
 
One some model 68K macs a dead battery will keep them from turning on (mac II, IIx, IIfx being the most common with that issue). A dead battery on a IIci will not cause you any problems outside of not keeping time. There are other things that will keep a IIci from turning on (bad PS and bad capacitors).

You said the machine would not boot an OS, that is a different problem.
 
Unknown_K said:
One some model 68K macs a dead battery will keep them from turning on (mac II, IIx, IIfx being the most common with that issue). A dead battery on a IIci will not cause you any problems outside of not keeping time. There are other things that will keep a IIci from turning on (bad PS and bad capacitors).

You said the machine would not boot an OS, that is a different problem.
Click to expand...

Ok, I took the battery out, and it still boots the system, but get the ?. They just said 'check the battery.'



I also tried downloading some of the System 7 .bin files from Apple's site.
I only have Windows machines, so I downloaded Stuffit for Windows to extract the bins.

I tried to use Transmac to create a boot disk from the image, but the Mac spits out the disk.

Any suggestions?


EDIT:

I downloaded system 7 from http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.0.x/

I opened the bin with stuffit and then got an SMI file. I couldn't open that with Transmac or HFS explorer.

Another EDIT:
I did manage to at least boot somewhat using the disk tools 8.5 disk here:
http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/bootdisks.html

Although it tells me it won't work with my computer. Prolly too new of a version?
I can't get the other disk tools images to boot.
 
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OS 8.5 is for PPC macs only.

68030 machines (like the IIci) can only run up to OS 7.6.1
68040 machines can only run up to OS 8.1

I never tried to make a bootable mac disk on a PC since I have dozens of macs here to work with.

One word of warning, if you drop a mac disk image that is not compressed (*.sit is compressed with stuffit) onto a fat or fat32 formatted drive you will ruin it (removes the resource fork from the file). NTFS formatted drives are ok.
 
Starshadow said:
http://www.macgeek.org/downloads/

Here you go.
Click to expand...

CORRECT... That was the best link EVER!!!!
Don't know why that didn't come up in the hundreds of pages I scoured last night...

Made a DISK TOOLS 7.5 disk and booted the system.
I can browse the SCSI drive, so it appears to still work.

I tried Disk First Aid and a Verify and repair on the volume, but it still won't boot from HD. I would like to try and fix this installation rather than reinstall, because there appears to be some useful programs on it.

Is there anyway to fix the system file?

Can I copy one from another disk to the HD, or would that be a bad idea.
Kinda hard to find specifics on an OS this old on the i-net.

Any help from you fine folk would be greatly appreciated.


Also, I would like to get a NuBus ethernet card for this.
I assume you would need the device software for it to work, is that hard to find? Are some more preferable than others?
 
Any nubus network card with RJ-45 should do, drivers are vailable for pretty much all of them online.
 
Unknown_K said:
Any nubus network card with RJ-45 should do, drivers are vailable for pretty much all of them online.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll be on the lookout for one.

From what I've been reading, I may try to 'rebless' the system folder.
Perhaps some files are missing from it. I was digging around on the HDD from the Disk Tools floppy, but wasn't really sure what I was looking for.

I am concerned because it does not appear that you can insert another disk when the system is booted from the Disk Tools floppy. I tried ejecting the disk, then the system prompted me to reinsert it.
Then there will be no way to copy files to/from the computer.

Will investigate further when I get home.

http://lowendmac.com/macdan/02/0916ek.html
 
as a Temp solution you can rename the System Folder on the HD( I used old system folder for the name), separate the System file from the Finder by copying one or the other to a folder out side the old system folder, then copy the floppy's system folder to the hd. That should get you booting off the HD.
 
BACK IN BUSINESS!

This lil darling now boots after copying the Finder from the setup disk to the System Folder.

I don't know if it was on the disk or not, but it showed up on the desktop after booting from the disk.

Learned so much already, thanks fellas! :mrgreen::mrgreen::mrgreen:

Looks like this was owned by an Apple employee. Most programs have site licenses for Apple Computer.
 
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Ok now you need to activate 32bit memory mode. Go to the memory control panel and you should see something like a "32 bit Address mode" option. Click it on and reboot. Your Mac should now have freed up a lot of memory. This will fix why it's showing your system taking up 14 mb. OS 7 shouldn't take that much ram.
 
Starshadow said:
Ok now you need to activate 32bit memory mode. Go to the memory control panel and you should see something like a "32 bit Address mode" option. Click it on and reboot. Your Mac should now have freed up a lot of memory. This will fix why it's showing your system taking up 14 mb. OS 7 shouldn't take that much ram.
Click to expand...

That will be reset each time he boots unless the pram battery is good.
 
Nice!

The IIcx and IIci computers have a habit of not wanting to power up. When that happens, take the power supply apart and look at the upside down board in the top section. Find the brown, heat discolored spot. Take the boards out, turn them around to where you can get to the top side of that board and look for the mylar film cap in that discolored area.

Replace that cap and you'll be good to go.

It was a VERY common problem and an odd one in that it was a film cap that went bad and not an electrolytic.

RJ
 
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