At 0:57 Uhr +0100 7.11.2000, schaecsn@gmx.de wrote:
>I have gotten a very old mac (macintosh II) and I would love to run my
>favorite os on it. the installation seems to be much more complicated
>that on my other hp300 machine.
>
>my major problem is that this mac has no MacOS on its harddrive. it
>boots mach3.0 - at least it starts to boot it but doesn't finish.

mach3.0? Not rather A/UX 3.0 (the first Apple flavour of Un*x)?

>the install.{txt,ps,html} file and the FAQ emphasis that one needs
>MacOS for the installation! really? no other way?

No other way. As it gets rehashed here every few months (see the archives)
we a) don't really know how to boot "native" from naked Macintosh 68k
hardware and b) rely on MacOS setting up part of the hardware for us. 68k
Macintoshes were built to run MacOS, period.

>As far as I
>understand one can boot netbsd after a successful installation from
>floppy, so do there exist some mac bootfloppys - similar the ones for
>intel-dos - with which i can do the installation?

Does your Mac II have 800k drives or 1.4M drives, i.e. can it read MFM
disks? Does it have an Ethernet card?

System 7 is available for download on ftp.apple.com. Unfortunately, this
leaves you with disk images in a MacOS specific format, i.e. you need
someone with a floppy-equipped Mac to help you out.

Basically, you need to get a barebones MacOS + tcp/ip networking going
(assuming your hp300 boxes have some sort of internet connectivity).

I installed 1.0A from floppy images back in '94, but I had time on my
hands,  and NetBSD has grown considerably since then...

>if the answer is "sorry, you are lost" then could somebody let me know
>the situation for linux?

Lunix is in the very same boat here.

Seeing you are mailing from *.de, I can probably snail-mail you a System 7
disk set if all else fails.

	hauke

--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)