Want to boot an old Mac Plus that has no hard drive or floppy

[cppoag]

I have an old Mac Plus that I *think* may still boot up if it had access to a drive with a compatible OS.  The internal floppy hasn’t worked for as long as I’ve owned it and the old PowerUser external hard drive appears to have bitten the dust.  Has anyone come up with a way to load an old MacOS onto a USB flash drive and then adapt that drive to plug into the Mac Plus SCISI port?  I don’t want to spend a ton of money, but would love to see if this old lady can still run.

[Mat]

To my knowlege, there is no SCSI to USB adapter in existance. So you have to go by SCSI somehow, or get a replacement Floppy. Of course there are other solutions like SCSI to SD-Card readers but these are quite expensive.

[SDG]

Have you tried taking the floppy apart and cleaning it? I had two seemingly dead drives: one in an SE and the other in an external 800k floppy drive. All that was required was to follow an online guide on how to take the drive partially apart, clean carefully with a cotton bud soaked in isopropanol, clear the dust bunnies with some canned air and finally regrease the moving parts with lithium grease very lightly. Both work as good as new now. Dirt and lint ingress can cause the moving parts to seize up over time and give the appearance of a totally dead drive.

[Daniel]

There's a very neat Floppy Emulator out there. Plug it into your external floppy port and it will pretend to be a boot disk.

It costs $109, which might cost too much for you, but it can definitely do the job.

https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/

[cppoag]

I think that EMU may be exactly what I’m looking for!  Thank you, all three of you, for the great suggestions!

[Mat]

OK, if we are talking about 100 bucks, I have to "advertize" the GigaFile: I tested it successfully with a bunch of Oldword Macs and MacOS 8.6 and 9.x. No drivers required: https://shop.inventronik.de/index.php?id_product=9&controller=product&id_lang=2