Macintosh Performa 6290cd

• I picked up a Macintosh Performa 6290cd.
• It’s not a machine I was actively seeking out. My friend Dan had a Performa when we were kids, but I otherwise never used one unless you count the LC’s at school.

• There’s nothing particularly significant about the Performa 6290cd.
• The machine has:
  • 100 MHz PowerPC 603e CPU
  • 8MB of RAM by default.
    The Maximum RAM available for a 6290cd was 64MB.
    As luck would have it, this machine came to me with the RAM maxed out.
    
  • A 1.2 GB hard drive by default, which was removed before I received the machine.
  • A 4X CD-ROM drive
• The default OS was System 7.5.1.
  The machine is capable of supporting System 7.5.1 - 9.1.

Replacement IDE hard drive using SD-card

• For around $10 I picked up a SDCard to IDE Adapter.
• These cards are pretty easy to pickup from eBay or AliExpress.

• Alternatively, this CF card can be purchased from Amazon.

• Both the SD and CF cards will work in the Performa 6290cd.

Boot using MacOS 7 Disk Tools

• Disk Tools Disk 1 will boot any Mac that originally shipped with a 68040 processor and a SCSI hard drive.

• Disk Tools Disk 2 will boot any Mac that originally shipped with a PowerPC 601, 603, or 604 processor, or a 68040 processor with an IDE hard drive.

  • Disk Tools Disk 2 contains Drive Setup Lite, which will only support official hard drives used in the original Macs.
  • To change to an SD-card, or CF, based IDE drive a version of Drive Setup 1.7.3 which has been patched to support non-Apple devices need to be used.

For simplicity sake, boot MacOS 7 Disk Tools from Disk a SCSI2SD v5.5

• I have a BMOW Floppy Emulator that works very well with classic Macs, including the Performa 6290cd.

• Since I already have functioning classic Mac’s runing System 7, it was easiest for me to setup a SCSI2SD v5.5 with a partition containing the Disk Tools Disk 2 System Folder along with the patched version of Drive Setup 1.7.3.

• Boot from the SCSI2SD

• And initialize the IDE drive.