>>>> I have a UMAX S900 without MacOS.  I'm trying to follow the System
>>>> Disk Tutorial.  It recommends that I download the Disk_Tools_PPC.img
>>>> file for the folks that do not have MacOS. [...]
>>>>
>>>> -- Ken Wellsch

>>> I'm guessing the .bin is BinHexed.  You'll have to find an UnBinHex
>>> utility to extract Disk_Tools_PPC.img from Disk_Tools_PPC.img.bin .

>> .bin would be MacBinary, not binhex.  Binhex has a .hqx extension.
>>
>> Bill Hayden

> if you get a happy mac on startup then you did unstuff it successfully
> [otherwise the mac wouldnt accept it as a boot volume].
> if you are within the US i could mail you a bootable MacOS CD... that
> would solve your problem.
> let me know
> 
> Jojo

Thank you for the offer!  As it happens, Michael Wolfson was kind enough
to provide some pointers in private e-mail.  As I sort of was guessing,
one needs MacOS to proceed here.  I have an older 68k based Mac running
MacOS 8.0 and I stumbled along with that to write working floppies.

[e.g. Disk Copy 4.2 did not recognize Disk_Tools_PPC.img as an
image, so I then downloaded 6.3.3 and that worked fine]

I think my attempt at extracting the "disk image" from Disk_Tools_PPC.img
was partially successful, but likely some blocks got scrambled due to the
fragile nature of the layers of OS-centric/application wrappings.

I expect copyright keeps us from stashing liberated copies of both Disk
Tools and System Disk on the NetBSD ftp site.

I am glad to see that unlike the 68k based Macs (at least a few years ago
anyway), that I should be able to run NetBSD without MacOS on this box.

The S900 came without any peripherals save the floppy drive.  I'm planning
to add the necessary hardware to produce a working box.  Hopefully I'll not
run into "it needs Apple tweaked peripherals to work" ... and that being
a clone box, it will not have other "features" that doom my attempt.

One clearly needs MacOS experience here; being an old UNIX dinosaur is a
handicap I'll have to overcome if I want to run UNIX on a Mac/PPC I think.

Thanks!

-- Ken