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Help with installing Mac OS 8 on a Power Mac 8500 - HDD not supported?

A

aaron7

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 24, 2003
Messages
456
I didn't know where to post this as the Apple forum seemed to be for 68000 only?

Purchased this Power Macintosh 8500/150 complete with all the discs thinking a fresh OS install would be easy. But I think I'm missing something!

This had two HDD in it, but the main drive had failed. I removed it entirely and left the secondary drive.

When I boot off the OS 8 CD and open up Drive Setup it does SEE it, but cannot do anything with it (says not supported).

The drive shows up on the desktop as "APS - My Sandbox". I can run a First Aid on it without issue.

How do I initialize this drive so I can load the OS?

Sorry for the pic dump, but thought it might help.

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Looks like something with a weird custom disk driver. What is the actual drive? You'll need to crack it open (sometimes literally with the 8500) to look at the model.

If it's a "regular" SCSI drive, sometimes you just have to whack the partition map completely. A tool like FWB Hard Disk Toolkit could help get your MACINTOSH as pretty as any other flower in your GARDEN.
 
Apple HD SC Setup and Drive Setup both have a whitelist for Apple hard disks which would prevent you from initializing and using just any disk. Most people got around this by using another formatter like from FWB but you can also either add your drive to the whitelist or in my opinion patch the whitelist out completely using ResEdit.
 
There is a hacked "patched" Apple drive setup on the internet you can download and use to format any SCSI HD. You can also use 3rd party software like LIDO that is free on the internet.

I generally use retail OS CD's for installs you have a CD meant for an Apple G3.
 
The icon looks like an enclosure, and if I recall correctly, APS was a seller of external SCSI enclosures (a quick ebay search confirms this). The drive you're seeing was likely swapped in from an external enclosure. Does it have system files or APS drive management software on it? You could also try changing the channel jumper, and as a last resort, pull it, put it in another SCSI system and wipe it there. A NetBSD CD may allow you to blank it to another file system that the OS 8 install disk won't recognize and will just offer to format for you.

E: Thinking about it again, I'd guess that since it was taken out of an external SCSI enclosure from the 90s, there is likely some kind of system setting (or bit turned on or something in the formatting, no telling whether you can change it unless you find the drive software and who knows even then) that prevents you from accidentally installing Mac OS to your external drive that presumably held your file backups.
 
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If the APS drive already appears on the desktop, is there really any need to re-initialize it? Can't you copy the System folder to the drive then do whatever magic it was to bless it? Or did that only work up through System 7?
 
kgober said:
If the APS drive already appears on the desktop, is there really any need to re-initialize it? Can't you copy the System folder to the drive then do whatever magic it was to bless it? Or did that only work up through System 7?
Click to expand...

I think 8 would allow that but it depends on if it is actually preventing the system from installing to it, because if it's able to do that then it may also be set to prevent it from being used as a bootable drive to prevent drive conflicts. Certainly worth a try, can't hurt anything.
 
Nearly a year later and I'm finally revisiting this.

Yes, the HDD was removed from an external enclosure at some point in its life. It's standard 68-pin SCSI, but not Apple branded (whitelisted).

Except for the standard factory install procedure I know very little about these machines.

In PC user terms... how do I go about editing the whitelist of drives so I can erase this and load fresh?
 
"Just use this" isn't really explaining anything. As I said in my last post I'm a PC user and this is all new to me!

Do burn that tool to a CD and boot off the OS install CD and run the tool?
 
The website actually tells you how to use the files.

MacOS 8.x should be able to handle .sit files with no additional software. So just download the 2nd or 3rd file, put it onto a DOS-formatted 3.5" disk, boot from your restore CD, insert the 3.5" disk and double-click on the .sit file. You should have the patched HDD setup tool after that extracted on the disk.
 
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