Good news – the Quadra 610 lives. And boots. There are still some issues to work through, which I will get to eventually, but my blood, sweat, and broken pieces of plastic might be worth it.
Here are a few of my learnings:
- The case plastic is brittle.
- I thought I had both a dead cdrom and floppy drive, but after some stubborn attempts, I got the machine to boot off of a Disk Tools floppy. Turns out I needed a working floppy disk that wasn’t older than my kids.
- Apparently, the cdrom drive is dead.
- After a successful boot, I was happy to see the Quadra has 40MB of RAM.
- I invested in a SCSI2SD (version 5b) during a sale on eBay. While it was a little tricky to get setup, don’t overthink it. Make sure you set the SCSI ID correct, a maximum of 2GB partitions, and don’t try to DD an image onto a partition unless you know exactly what you are doing. The Quadra was not booting at all for a while when I plugged in the SCSI interface in, because I had tried to put a Mac OS 7.6.1 cdrom on the first partition in a clumsy, ill-advised manner.
- Your Power Mac G5 is a friend. After formatting the first partition using a handy Disk Tools floppy, the partition mounts on my G5. I was able to copy over the install files for System 7.6.1 at that point. And then I was able to install from that partition on to another partition. It was a juggling trick but it worked.
- The thing boots pretty quickly off of the SCSI2SD interface. I updated a few pieces via the System7Today guides. Netscape Navigator 3.0.8 runs quickly. Turn off java and javascript.
- Future updates: Cleaning memory slots, figuring out if I can revive the CDROM drive, and installing A/UX on to another partition.
Progress is good.
— Nathan