Got a clean Mac OS installed on the PowerBook Duo
January 27, 2005It took a lot longer than it should have, but I finally got a clean Mac OS 7.5.3 install on the old PowerBook Duo. I fumbled around a lot, it’s been a long long time since I last had to really fiddle around with the older Mac OS.
I downloaded the disk images onto one of my old G3 towers (which runs some version of OS 9, I think 9.1). Then I grabbed the Network Access Disk from Apple’s site, as well as the older DiskCopy 4.x version (couldn’t figure out how to get a floppy image transferred in DiskCopy 6.x).
After extracting the OS 7.5.3 parts, I copied the images to floppy to transfer them onto the Duo (which was plugged into the Duo Dock, that’s the only way I have to connect a floppy to the Duo). There’s 19 parts I had to copy, lots of disk swapping.
So then I used DiskCopy to transfer the Network Access Disk image onto a floppy, and used the dock’s floppy to boot up with the NAD image. That way I could erase the existing System folder, and run the OS 7.5.3 installer.
These are just the steps that worked. There were lots of intermediate steps I tried that didn’t work, before I arrived at this magic recipe. So now the Duo has a clean Mac OS and I can start installing some software. I picked up an old WordPerfect Works from the Mac swap meet for a couple bucks, as well as a free copy of Claris Organizer. Both are now installed on the Duo. Just waiting for a copy of Quicken that I got on eBay to arrive, and then the Duo should be ready for action.
Oh and probably I need to find a new battery. The one it came with is not holding much of a charge even after running the reconditioning software.
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