[rescue] Quadra 650 - Newb questions/parts seeking

Thu Jan 25 16:09:34 CST 2007

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 03:34:31PM -0600, Chad McAuley wrote:

> Howdy folks.  There's a Quadra 650 (along with a LaserWriter II and a
> Macintosh 16" Color Display) here at work that's been doing nothing
> but occupying desk space for ages[0].  To save it the cruel fate of
> going off for recycling (or getting tossed in the dumpster), I'm going
> to take it home and play with it.  However, I'm very much a newb when
> it comes to all things Macintosh, especially the older systems, so I
> have some questions.

Sounds good to me. 

> 
> 1) This particular machine has no CD-ROM drive.  From what I can tell
> a 2x drive came standard on these machines, so it'd be safe to assume
> the original died and was pulled, right? Either way, do I need a
> specific Apple branded CD-ROM to go in here, or will any 50-pin SCSI
> drive work?

Or used somewhere else. You need an Apple drive to boot from CDs.
There were two different drives used in them, the CD300, made by Sony
and OEM'ed by Apple. This one can be used to boot many Sun4 machines
(those that accept the "boot cdrom" command), so it may have been pulled
for that. The other is the 300+ made by Matsushita which was not as good 
IMHO.

Almost any drive will do with the correct drivers. Do a search for CD Sunrise.
It's a freeware driver that will work with almost anything.

Or you can use an external drive, it needs to be terminated and scsi
ID 1-6.

> 2) It currently has System 7.1 on it.  In my research I noticed that
> this machine will run up to System 8.1, and that System 7.5.3 is
> freely available from Apple.  Two questions: First, what the hell do I
> do with these disk images?  The readme says to download them to the HD
> and then click on the first part to open the image.  Can I just
> upgrade from there, or do I need to them get them on other media
> (i.e., floppy) in order to install?  Secondly, should I bother trying
> to run System 8.1 on here, or would I be better off sticking with
> 7.5.x?

It depends upon how much RAM it has. RAM is simple 8 chip SIMMS. I think
you need 60NS, but it's worth checking out. You can go up to 16m per
SIMM if you can find them. If you put in 4 identical SIMMs, it will
interleave memory access and be noticably faster.

Contact me offlist for operating systems. I can help you.

If you do download them to the hard drive, you need to boot from
the network software install floppy or a cd rom and then click on
them to mount and run them. You can install the OS to the drive
the images are on, but only if you have not booted from it.

Note that 7.0.1 was released on floppy, 7.1 was released on floppy but
was not distributed as free, 7.5 was distributed on floppy and CD (rare),
7.6 was distributed only on CD, but has floppy images on the CD,
and 8.0 was released as a CD. 8.1 was released as a CD or as an upgrade
to 8.0.

Good choices are 7.0 with both system updates, 7.5.3 (not 7.5.5),
7.6.1 (7.6 from CD plus updater), 8.1.

7.1 is a good choice if you can get it. Each level up requires more
RAM and HD space.

> 3) It currently has the original 250MB HD in it.  What's the biggest
> drive I can put in this?  I'm not sure what I'll end up using it for
> yet, but I'd like to get a bigger HD in there.  And again, do I need
> an Apple branded drive, or will anything work?

The largest I've put in one is 2gig. There are size limitations based
upon the operating system. You need an Apple branded drive for the
system to be installed on it. If you don't have an Apple branded drive.
you can find a patched version of the drive init that will work with it
(not recommended) or SilverLining (recommended) commercial software
to format it. STFW.

> 4) I found some 72-pin memory hiding here in a box at work, and was
> able to take it from the 8MB on board up to 80MB.  It sees it all
> fine, and once I discovered I had to enable 32-bit addressing it was
> even available to programs.  However, that setting isn't sticking, so
> I have to keep turning it back on.  Is this a System 7.1 thing, or
> might I have a dead battery or something on my hands?

Your PRAM (parameter RAM battery) is dead. It's a 3.6 volt lithium 
battery. If you are in a rush, or just plain cheap, a 3 volt CR-2
battery (from any camera store) will do. Mark the polatity of the old
battery in magic marker on the motherboard before you remove it.

Apple changed from 3 volt to 3.6 volt batteries because of problems
with PRAM working at the lower voltage. I have not had any trouble.
YMMV.

> - either an AAUI-15 to RJ45 transceiver or a nubus ethernet card with
> a RJ45 jack so I can hook  the Quadra up to my network

Someone on this list had a card. I have a few transcievers, but
I'm hoarding them. They were hard to find and expensive here.

> - a CD-ROM

Should be easy to find. 

> - either the VRAM upgrade chips or a nubus video card that will allow
> me to run higher color depths

Awfully rare.

> - 3 more 32MB sticks of RAM so I can max this guy out

Even rarer.

> - a larger HD

No real problem at all. Any SCSI drive will do if you don't remove
the old one first. It MUST have terminators to be the only internal
drive.

When you post things like this, you should always say where you are
located. I'd be glad to help you, but I doubt that you are local
to me. 

Don't forget to clean the heads on the floppy drive.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667  Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/