Install MacOS to vintage Macintosh

I had recently gotten my hands on a Macintosh LC II. I wanted to try my hand at restoring it via retrobrighting, replacing capacitors, and anything else that needed to be done.

This post is to document the solution I found for the most challenging part, which was getting MacOS installed. The challenges were due to the fact that I had to source the installation media from a Windows PC. Secondly, the only removable media the LC II has is a floppy drive. So I had to find a compatible version of MacOS that had the installation medium available as separate floppy images. With those, I could use a USB floppy drive on my PC to write the installation images to those floppys and use them on the LC II.

I was able to locate MacOS 7.5 floppy images here. The download is a StuffIt format, so I had to download the StuffIt expander for Windows.

This then gave me several *.IMAGE files. I had to convert these from IMAGE files to DSK files, which can be done with DiskCopy2Dsk.

Finally, once I had the DSK files, I could use HFVExplorer to write the DSK images to the floppy disk.