Has anyone cloned an HDD for a Macintosh IIvx?

DomBombadil

11/9/22, 9:57 PM

Where I work as a sysadmin, we have an old Macintosh IIvx that is the only one left in the world with an obscure program on it that will cost the company a ton of money if they can't use it. Well, the dreaded day has come.

Yesterday, it wasn't booting and just showing a black screen, there appeared to be damage on the PSU, so we replaced the PSU with another one we found that had a broken fan. Replaced the PSU fan on that one with parts from another we had sitting around and it finally worked again.

Now today, it's locking up and shutting down. I'm thinking the best bet right now is to get a functioning one online, and try to put the hard drive from my machine in it.

Does anyone have experience just moving the HDD to another machine on these? Does that even work or is there copy protection/etc? On a related note, does anyone have any experience cloning a drive for a IIvx and what is the best way to go about that? Because I could also be experiencing some HDD issues.

Thanks for any input!

1 + 1

hardware

troubleshooting

mac

legacy

clone

Michael Hampton

11/9/22, 11:47 PM

Clearly the bill has come due. Well it was past due for many years and is now no longer avoidable. I think you'll find almost nobody around here has experience with such ancient hardware; you might try our sister site [retrocomputing.se] but you should expect to have permanently lost the data.

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Server

Gordon Davisson

11/10/22, 12:01 AM

Caveat: I haven't dealt with Macs that old since... not too long after they were current, so I make no promises about the accuracy of my memory. You might get better answers over on the Retrocomputing stackexchange.

The first thing I'd do is check the clock battery for leakage. It's a big 3.6V lithium cell (non-rechargeable) on the logic board; I don't remember if it's socketed or wired in on the IIvx. If it's leaked, remove it and clean the motherboard as best you can (including washing out crud that's hiding under chips). It'll run without the battery if necessary, but the clock'll reset (to 1956 IIRC?) and it'll lose a few other settings every time it's powered down.

For mobility: Mac OS has no copy protection (Apple wants to sell you the computer; once you've bought that they're happy), but compatibility between different hardware models and OS versions is a bit of a maze (and some models need a special "System Enabler" file under some OS versions). The IIvx could run Mac OS versions 7.1 (with System Enabler 001) through 7.6.1 (see this and this), so your drive might have any version in that range on it. If you know the specific version, that'll help you search for a compatible replacement. Depending on the "obscure program"'s compatibility, you might also be able to migrate it to another Mac OS version.

You might also be able to find an emulator that'll run what you need, but I don't have any experience there.

Copying the contents of the disk is pretty easy provided you do it with Traditional Mac OS (i.e. before OS X aka 10.x, which is actually a completely different OS). Just use the built-in utility to format the new disk (IIRC it was called HD Setup under later versions of Mac OS, not sure about 7.x), and drag-copy the files over. As long as you copied the System Folder and all its contents, it'll make the new drive bootable.

Compatibility with OS X and other OSes is more limited. Those old versions of Mac OS used the "Mac OS Standard" volume format (aka HFS), which was replaced by "Mac OS Extended" (HFS+) starting in 8.1; later versions of Mac OS and early versions of OS X still supported Mac OS Standard, but I'm pretty sure that died off quite a while ago.