Use a Zip Drive on a Pre-System 6 800K Drive Mac

Use a Zip Drive on a Pre-System 6 800K Drive Mac

The Zip drive is one of the best external drives you can add to your Vintage Mac. It offers 100MB storage, massive for an old Mac, as well as a way to organize documents and applications for specific tasks, not to mention transfer files back and forth between modern Macs and old ones and providing a convenient platform to create new floppy disks.

The best part about it, is that it can be used as a startup disk to run every operating system from OS X Tiger, all the way back to System 1.0. You heard me right ... the Zip can not only be accessed by an old Mac running virtually any system, but the Zip can also boot any vintage Mac with a SCSI port, from any compatible System.

Since the Zip is HFS formatted only, while it will load MFS System 1.1 & 2.0, it is probably an unwise thing to do as neither system is HFS aware, despite the ROM’s ability to recognize that file structure.

You’ll need a SCSI compatible Mac. A Mac Plus, SE & Mac II are the obvious pre-system 6 choices, but if you happen to have a rare SCSI upgraded 128Ke or 512Ke, they should work just as effectively.

Use an Iomega 4.2 Formatted Zip Disk.

If you have a Zip disk already formatted with the Iomega 4.2 driver, you’re set to go.

1. Connect your ZIP disk.
2. Insert your 4.2 formatted drive.
3. Turn on your Mac.
4. If you’ve already copied a valid System onto the drive, the drive should
startup the Mac.
5. If the disk is blank, you will have to start up the Mac with any System
disk. The drive should automatically mount. Then you can copy your
System file onto it and restart.

Formatting a Zip disk with the 4.2 driver.

1. Create a minimal System 6.0.x disk and copy the Iomega 4.2 driver
onto it. Then startup your Mac with this disk.
2. Insert your Zip disk and you should see a dialogue box telling you the
disk is unreadable, would you like to initialize it? Select “Yes” and your
Mac will format it and install the 4.2 driver on it.
3. Once the Zip disk appears on your desktop, you may then copy ANY
System onto it and use it as a startup disk.

If you have a network of old Macs, the fact that the Zip can run an older System makes it a good choice for use with old disk networking programs like MacServe.

This site is a work in progress and a labor of love. Many of the tutorials will eventually have pictures to make things clearer and links will be added to make finding resources easier. In the meantime, if you need help with any of these steps, please let me know by posting comments to help me revise the tutorial. If you need a direct response, please also include an e-mail address.

The Setup

Disk Server

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