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Obviously that means you’ll need a floppy drive and at least one 1.4 MB floppy disk. Now that we have a raw DSK image, it’s time to write that file to a floppy disk. On Windows, it’s as simple as dragging the “Network Access.image” file onto convert2dsk.exe, which will then create the “Network ” file we want. Simply pass it an image file (or folder of image files) and it’ll convert them into DSK files. It works on Windows, OSX, and Linux, can even handle image files that are BinHex (.hqx) or MacBinary (.bin) encoded.

To strip that metadata we’re going to use a tool called Convert2Dsk.Ĭonvert2Dsk is a small command-line tool I wrote to convert Disk Copy 4.2 images into raw DSK images on modern PCs. It’s a Disk Copy 4.2 image with all of the data we want, but it’s still wrapped up in some metadata we don’t. Now, the file we’ve exported is almost what we need.

Use ExportFI to export the “Network Access.image” file out of Mini vMac back to your PC.

Use Stuffit Expander within Mini vMac to extract the archive’s contents.

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Use ImportFI to import the archive file into Mini vMac.

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Download the Network_Access_Disk_7.5.sea.bin archive to your PC.

To start, we’ll need to use Mini vMac to get the Disk Copy image out of the archive: That is, we want a file with a 1-to-1 copy of the bits of that bootable floppy, without any extraneous headers or metadata.

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Without access to a real mac floppy drive, what we want is a raw DSK image of the Network Access disk. What I’ve got set up is a Macintosh II running System 7.5.5 with Stuffit Expander and Disk Copy (as above), along with the apps ImportFI and ExportFI to get files into and out of the emulator. There are already plenty of tutorials out there for that and it’s worthwhile to get comfortable with the program before continuing.

#Mini vmac expander how to

Now, I’m not going to detail how to get Mini vMac set up. Other than the lack of networking and CDs, it covers most of my needs quite well. To be honest, I use Mini vMac as a bridge machine way more often than I use my PowerMac. What you’ll need to do is create a bridge machine in emulation, with something like Mini vMac. You’ll need a real, already working vintage mac to write one of these older floppies. Note: Okay, technically, if your vintage mac only accepts 400/800k disks, then the answer is no. But let’s assume for a moment that you don’t have a bridge machine, is it still possible to create a vintage mac boot floppy? Yes! I could have easily done the whole process, from download to physical floppy, right there. This is where having a bridge machine, like the Power Macintosh 8600/200 I previously restored, comes in handy. Then you can use the Disk Copy program to write the extracted “Network Access.image” file to a real floppy. It’s provided as a disk image stored in a MacBinary-encoded self-extracting archive, so the first step is to download it onto a working classic mac and extract the disk image with Stuffit Expander. However by this time system CDs were becoming the norm, so the closest I could find was Apple’s System 7.5 Network Access Disk. While there are many methods for doing this, I decided that since I’m planning on installing 7.5.5, that I wanted a 7.5.5 boot floppy. So the actual first thing I need to do is to make a bootable floppy. It works perfectly fine with the SCSI2SD, however it doesn’t come preinstalled on a bootable floppy. The solution is to use the third-party disk formatter Lido 7.5.6. They don’t recognize the non-Apple drive by default, and even if you get a “patched” version which does, the resulting disk will have data corruption problems. However, I’ve found that those programs don’t work well with the SCSI2SD. The usual process is to boot from a floppy and use either the Apple HD SC Setup (for System 6) or Drive Setup (for System 7) program to format the drive. The first thing I want to do is format that 1.75 GB drive with an HFS filesystem.

#Mini vmac expander install

I’m using the aforementioned SCSI2SD to simulate a single 1.75 GB hard drive, on which I intend to install System 7.5.5. I’ve installed 64 MB of RAM along with a GGLABS MACSIMM ROM replacement. Now it’s time to get that disk formatted and a working system installed, but to do so I’ll need to create a boot floppy first.Īs a quick recap, at this point I have a Macintosh SE/30 with a working floppy drive. In Part VIII of this series, I finished prepping a 2 GB SD card for the SCSI2SD that will serve as the primary disk for my vintage Macintosh SE/30.