I set out to connect my 80SC to my Mac Plus. Previously I had it connected to my SE since it looked better there, matching the Snow White design.



The SE has an internal drive, so an external one seemed redundant and overkill. I thought the 80SC would be better suited on the Plus, making it a more robust machine capable of storing disk images for easy duplication. Maybe help alleviate some of the disk-duplicating duties of the SE. If I could duplicate disks in parallel, things would move along that much faster.

I connected the 80SC to the Plus and booted it with a System 6.0.8 floppy. I then popped my Lido disk in my external 800K drive and ran it. Lido picked up the 80SC no problem. I picked a drive icon….



Formatted it…



And set the interleave to 3:1.



I then mounted the drive and quit Lido. The drive was successfully mounted on the desktop. So far so good.



I then ran the System 6.0.8 installer.





Success.



Once that was done. I opened the System folder to bless it. I then rebooted the machine. Strangely, the boot process gets stuck at the flashing question mark. Actually, the question mark doesn’t flash at all. It’s stuck. If the question mark was flashing then I’d say it skipped right over the drive, but the fact that’s it’s solid leads me to believe that it attempted to do something.

Figuring it might be a driver issue, I tried to format the drive with Apple’s HD Setup utility. Although it detected the drive, it was unable to format it. It seemed to take forever formatting it. Eventually it dumped out at the end with a failure. Remember, my 80SC doesn’t contain the stock 80 MB drive, I threw a 700 Meg drive in there. Could that be the problem?



I retried Lido. This time formatting and partitioning the drive with two partitions, including a 40 MB boot volume.



I even used PMount to specify that the volume should be bootable, just to be sure.



Both partitions mount without a problem.



I reinstalled System 6 again and restarted the Mac.



It just wont boot from the drive. I’ve checked the SCSI ID, termination, and everything else I can think of. I don’t think it’s a hardware issue, or the drive wouldn’t mount on the desktop. (Or let me install System 6 for that matter.) I’ve tried everything. I don’t have the SCSI ROM bug either. I checked that. I have a rev C ROM. Apple caught the bug about a month and a half into production, so there’s no way the Platinum Macs were effected. Not to mention I can boot off a Zip drive. I’m beginning to think this drive just isn’t compatible with the Plus. As simple as that.

I cracked open the dead LC575 that I got for $5 and pulled out the 80 MB hard drive and put it in the 80SC.



It’s too bad it’ll remain a stock 80SC. I was really looking forward to having some serious storage in there. Then again, 80 MBs will hold a ton of disk images. I reconnected the 80SC to the Plus and fired it up. With much relief, it booted right off the 80SC.



Of course, the boot failed because the OS on the LC520 drive isn’t compatible with the Plus, but it boots! I restarted with a floppy and checked out the drive’s contents. Wow, there’s a ton of stuff on here, including over 30 games!



I deleted the System folder and moved all the keepers into another one. I then ran the System 6.0.8 installer for the third time and gave the machine a reboot.

Success!



So it was the 700 MB drive after all. The Mac Plus just doesn’t like it, despite it being an Apple-branded drive. Now all I have to do is get some networking down and maybe I’ll be able to swap files with the SE via AppleShare.