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Disinfectant INIT freezing accelerated Mac Plus on startup
Posted by: Crutch on 2018-12-15 16:15:29
Hi, sorry for the possibly niche question but I haven't been able to find any info on this problem --

I recently picked up a Mac Plus + HD-20 running System 6.0.8 and just fixed it up with 4MB RAM and installed a Radius Accelerator 16 board (which is awesome, by the way).  After that I cleaned up the HD and installed Disinfectant -- and suddenly noticed the system hangs on startup.  Pretty quickly I figured out that with the Disinfectant 3.7.1 INIT installed, the system always hangs after loading the last INIT (which isn't necessary Disinfectant) and before the Finder appears.  This happens 100% of the time with the Disinfectant INIT installed, and never happens without it.

I tried reinstalling 6.0.8 and deleting the INIT and installing a fresh copy from inside the Disinfectant application.  I have NOT tried removing the Radius board because that's a huge pain and frankly I'd rather do without the INIT anyway -- so I don't know yet if things would be fine without it (soon I will set up another old Mac Plus and try the HD-20 without an accelerator and maybe learn something).  But I was hoping someone might know of any known incompatibilities (and hopefully a fix?) between some subset of the Disinfectant INIT, the HD-20, and a Radius Accelerator 16?  (I've basically never heard of Disinfectant being incompatible with anything, it always seemed to be the perfect-citizen INIT.)

Ideas for a good virus protection alternative also welcome.  I have a bunch of old floppies that have been bequeathed to me from various sources and I've found a lot of them have flavors of nVIR/CDEF/WDEF on them.  I guess I could just scan the hard drive every so often ...
Posted by: techknight on 2018-12-15 17:45:16
If you use a relatively modern copy of a virus program for Mac, I believe it covers all the viruses. like an OS9 early OSX virus protection software for PPC. 

Scrub your collection, and you dont need any of that crap. 

Then you do not have to worry about it. Its not like any modern viruses targeted for those old machines are coming out, and if it did, nothing will see it anyway. 
Posted by: just.in.time on 2018-12-15 18:31:09
I don't use any virus protection on my vintage Macs.  I trust most software on the garden and don't think that is really something you have to worry about at this point 🙂  Sounds like something to hog up RAM and CPU cycles to be honest.

If you are really concerned, use a Mac running OS X 10.5.x or lower (but still 10.0 or above) and a USB floppy drive, then copy the files you need from there to a fresh disk and leave behind the questionable files.
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