Rebuilding Power Macintosh 9600

So, after my initial success with resurrecting some floppies using the
isopropyl alcohol trick, I immediately ran into a major hurdle when my
Performa 5320, the only Mac with a floppy I had working, suddenly
ceased to work... Taking it apart to try and fix 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.

I've been meaning to rebuild a PM 9600 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 battlestation  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 is now! I need a machine with floppy drive to continue to
save my disks. :)

I started yesterday and after a little trial and error (mostly fixed by
removing all but a single pair of RAM sticks) have got a stock build
booting with the 9.0.4 retail CD. I want to have this machine run 7.6.1
only, I use this G4 MDD for OS9, but I cannot boot the 9600 with my 7.6
retail CD, so figured I'd install OS9 in the first instance to a
partition and then install 7.6.1 to another partition and go from
there. However, I am using a SCSI2SD adapter and the Drive Setup app on
the OS9 CD doesn't like it and will not initialize it.

Today's job will be to get a copy of FWB onto a Zip disk and see if I
can mount into that while booted into the OS9 CD. If so, I should be
able to work with the SD card hard drive. If not, I will think again!

Once I get past this issue and get the machine set up as stock with
7.6.1, I will then start to add upgrades; max out the RAM, add a Sonnet
G3 or G4 board, and fit a high-end Radeon video card (forget the model
numbers now but I've got several in my storage crates to choose from).
My goal is to have an absolute insane monster of an OS7 machine.