Power Macintosh 9600 Rebuild
Published: Saturday, 21st December 2024
A few months ago, as summer 2024 was coming to a close, my trusty old Macintosh Performa 5320 met its demise and suddenly refused to power on.
Opening it up to investigate fixing it was a disaster, the plastic internals simply crumbled to dust. By the time I got the motherboard out, there was no way it was ever going in true again but it was hopeless anyway; the battery had vented and wrecked a bunch of chips. So, it turned into a salvage job and I now have a few more spares for the parts bin.
This was especially annoying as it was the only operational Mac I had that had a floppy drive, and I was just getting started with a project that required a floppy drive. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity, though!
Making One Great Machine Out Of Four Donor Systems
I’ve been meaning to rebuild a Power Macintosh 9600 system for some time now. I had four of the things, all in various states of distress; one that was particularly souped up and had been my main battle-station for a number of years but was very tatty, and the others that ranged from ugly on the outside but fine on the inside to full of rot inside but cosmetically fine. I had the makings, then, of at least one really nice example.
So, a few months ago I stripped all four of them down to the frames, cleaned everything and salvaged any piece worth keeping. This all went into a couple of large PVC storage crates waiting for their time, and that time finally came around when I needed a machine with a floppy drive.
My end-goal was to have a hyper-powerful, souped-up and on steroids OS7-dedicated machine; I’ve never liked OS8 and my G4 MDD is a great OS9 machine so no need for OS9 on the 9600.
For upgrades, I was spoilt for choice; I had several Sonnet CPU cards of various speeds at hand, a big stack of compatible RAM to max the thing out with, a couple of high-end video cards, plus a galaxy of PCI cards (USB, firewire, serial, SCSI) to choose from. I figured it would be safest to start out modest as I rebuilt, so used an original 8MB video card, a single pair of RAM modules, and a stock 300Mhz 604ev CPU card.
I also had a SCSI2SD hard drive adapter which meant that I could ditch the use of a spinning drive for fast and silent solid state storage. However, this was the first stumbling block I ran into as the Drive Setup app on the install media I was using would not recognise the SD card as a hard drive. I’ve overcome this before using third-party hard drive tools and was able to mount a Zip disk with FWB Hard Disk Toolkit on while booted into the OS installer and could then initialize and format the SD card.
Subsequently, a guy I was chatting to about the project mentioned using a BlueSCSI board rather than the SCSI2SD so I purchased one, and also acquired for a reasonable price the original CD installer that was bundled with the 9600. When both of these arrived from their respective sellers I soon had OS7.6.1 up and running and the 9600 was booting reliably.
Mac OS 7 Flies With A Lot Of Power
Now, even with this modest initial hardware configuration, OS7 absolutely flies! It’s a very lightweight operating system and can run incredibly nicely on much lower-powered Macs than a stock 9600, and everything about it feels super-snappy with this much power driving it. That said, though, much more power was on its way!
The first upgrade I plumbed in was the CPU; I decided to go crazy and used a Sonnet Crescendo G4 450Mhz. Installing the software and then swapping in the card, I was very pleased to see the computer boot successfully, with the Sonnet logo now showing on the boot screen.
Next up was the video card. I installed a Radeon 9200 Mac Edition video card, with 128MB vRAM. No OS7 drivers for it, so no accelerated graphics and fancy stuff, but the basics of the card works without software and the display on screen was noticeably sharper and better oriented than I was getting from the stock video card, so a good outcome here.
Then I started adding more RAM. Previously, I had a total of 1GB RAM in a 9600 and was hoping to get all of that into this rebuilt machine. Alas, no joy; once I had managed to get four pairs of RAM installed (booting between each addition of a pair to make sure they were OK) the final couple of pairs just wouldn’t allow the machine to boot properly, eventually producing the breaking glass error sound alert.
Mission Accomplished, For Now…
By that point in the rebuild, I didn’t have the energy to pull all the RAM and start again trying these pairs in different slots, so figured that the half Gig or so of RAM I had successfully working was good enough for now. Only thing is, I need to learn OS7 again! It’s been at least 5 years or more since I was last a regular user and there’s enough difference between OS7 and OS9 that I am feeling very clunky as I blunder around, not quite knowing where everything is…
I also bought a little wheeled computer trolley/stand from Amazon, plonked the 9600 onto that and wheeled it into place under my desk. It does look very majestic sitting there, the styling of these big-box beige Macs is a real visual treat, in my opinion.
Finally, I made a customised front faceplate using an old Apple badge I had laying around, just to put a little personal touch to the rebuild.
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