It seems like I have an adequate assortment of formatting tools here, it is just that I have not fine tuned anything. I don't know what the SE likes, really. For instance, that interleave of 2 which was recommended - I read the same on LEM but the SE profile also says that this is because of slower drives of that vintage, that newer buffered drives don't need the older setup. I don't have enough experience with this to have an opinion yet. Next things I will do tonight are use my hokey disk transfers to copy over utilities for formatting and localtalk to make floppies of, so if I decide to reformat that getting connected to another Mac for my files becomes easier. On my 1400cs I used the HD SC setup for A/UX, and on my SE Lido seems to work, as does the Cutting Edge formatter which came with the external drive.

Yes, Bunsen and 128, MIDI troubles are how I learned about Appletalk in the first place! I installed OMS on my 8500 with SVP and Max and saw the warnings, along with the readme of practically every MIDI app I have seen until X. It sounded like such trouble that I couldn't understand why anybody would ever use Appletalk. But a few years later once I had more Macs it has saved the day on occasion. Now it seems like a necessity for me, at least for sharing apps and documents between systems.

Scott, I have double-density drives only. Until recently I didn't know that superdrives were around in the 68k days. For a few minutes I toyed with finding a SWIM and trying to graft one from one of my parts machines, but really localtalk will be enough. I will look for System Tools to see wot da de-al.