I have a Macintosh SE that’s on its last legs. The cursor and mouse barely works. I can’t click on any of the actual data and I don’t know if the floppy drive works. I can turn on the computer and see the files. That’s about it.
On its hard drive are about 10 megs of stories, poems, letters and newspaper articles that I don’t have hard copies of anymore.
I want to take what’s off that computer and convert the data into something I can use on my current Windows XP Dell PC. I can stand formatting losses so long as the actual words are okay.
I have a budget: $200.
The Mac Guy I talked to on the phone says I’m SOL, the system is too old, he can’t get parts for it, etc. So I now turn to the geek-fu of the Teeming Millions.
I’m not quite clear. Can you do enough to save the data on floppies? If so, the problem shouldn’t be difficult at all. It would just involve finding another mac that can read the disks and then saving the data as text files. I know that Macs over 10 years old can write to PC formatted disks. Once you do that, the problem is trivial. You just open the files as text in any PC application like notepad, or Word and do what you want with it.
**Shag, ** the mouse clicks and highlights, but it doesn’t work well enough to drag it to open files and save. I can move the mouse up and down, just not side to side or diagonally. I’ve cleaned out the rubber ball in the mouse and I’m convinced that’s probably not the problem. I have no idea if the floppy drive is working. Oh, maybe this is important: it’s missing the keyboard.
You need to get a keyboard off of E-bay. Missing keyboards cause all kinds of screwy problems. Also, I am pretty sure that you can use a keyboard to navigate to and save files. That is step one.
I’m pretty sure that a Mac SE doesn’t have IDE drives…
It is probably straight SCSI, though, so you may be in luck. If this is the case, you need to figure out what flavor of SCSI it is and you may be able to get a SCSI controller and some software (I know Linux has Mac FS support as a kernel option). Getting a new ADB mouse and keyboard are well within reach, as well – both give over 100 hits on eBay, and they are very cheap. Apparently, the Mac SE has a external floppy drive plug as well (for plugging in a second floppy) and a DB-25 SCSI plug on the back. This would allow you to buy an external drive, but again format would be a problem.
I think, if you have a working keyboard and mouse, the best option would be to try and establish a null modem connection with it and another computer and copy it over. My memory is dim on System 6 and 7, but I think it is supported natively and doesn’t require external programs beyond your regular communications programs that you are using to talk to the modem (which I assume you were using to get the thing to talk to anything else).
But at 15 years old I’d be dubious - I don’t recall when Mac System software started being able to read/write PC disks, but I’ve certainly worked with ones that were unable to (for a while you needed extra software to do so, until the capability was integrated into the System).
I meant to do it in several steps. Write the files to a Mac disk if needed and then find a Mac that can write to PC disks. It may take time but it important to get the data off the computer as soon as possible.
Not a Mac Maven but Edwino is correct in that it uses a SCSI drive so slaving it to a IDE based Win-tel box is probably out unless you have an old SCSI controller.
Get a new, keyboard, mouse and external SE floppy off EBay (should be less than $ 30- 50 total) and spend some quality time puling the info off. In looking at the eBay ads for Macintosh SE stuff it might be cheapest to just by an entire working machine + accessories for 30. or so instead of getting the additional pieces.
The machine is probably fine. Best bet is to get a new mouse. For the rest I’ll assume you don’t have access to a Mac with a built-in floppy drive.
The version of Mac OS installed will determine whether the SE can read a PC formatted floppy. If you have System 7.0.1, with usually comes with PC Exchange, or higher, it should work.
If your SE has a FDHD (floppy disk, high density, AKA “SuperDrive”), then a regular high-density floppy will be fine.
If the SE only has a 720K/800K floppy drive, you will either need some double density floppy disks or convert a high density floppy drive by taping over the hole across from the write protect tab. Note that this is not reliable for long-term use, but it will work fine for transferring files.
If you don’t have PC Exchange, you will have to have an FDHD model. PC floppy drives cannot read 400K/800K formatted floppies due to a hardware limitation. Put the files on a Mac formatted disk, then use TransMac to read the floppy disk.
Failing all that, you will have to put the hard drive in another computer. A cheap SCSI card and TransMac will let you access the files on a PC. The hard drive is already terminated and set with the correct SCSI ID, so you just have to plug it in to the SCSI card.
Removing the hard drive is a challenge. It involves using a long-handled Torx T15 screwdriver to remove the back and working near exposed CRT hardware. If you are not hardware-inclined I recommend you have someone else remove the hard drive.
Sometimes the VIA chips on the motherboards of those SE’s go bad, and a new mouse/keyboard won’t work either. If that’s the case, you can rip the hard drive out of the unit, and put it in an old external SCSI drive case. You’ll need a long torx driver to open the SE’s case, but it’s not a complicated or difficult procedure. You can get old SCSI drives for $10-20 bucks at places like Computer Renaissance. Once you have the drive running as an external SCSI you can take it to your Mac repairman, and have him connect it to a more modern machine which’ll dump the data in any format you want.
I’ll do it (open all the files, convert them to a format you can use, place them on PC-formatted media) for free as long as you eat the shipping cost. I’d need the hard drive, not the whole MacSE. In fact, I no longer have a case cracker or a long Torx to open one, so I’d strongly prefer the HD and not the whole SE.
I have an external SCSI “bring your own disk” empty drive and a Mac that can boot 8.6 (and an older one that can do 7 if necessary), as well as DataViz MacLink translators old enough to deal with SE-vintage files if I don’t have the apps for them (and I’ve got a wide assortment of the actual apps, including MacWrite 4.6, Excel 2.2, FileMaker 2, etc).
If that sounds useful, email me with “SDMB” in the subject line.
