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[A/UX] Drop-in clean A/UX install image for SCSI2SD

pb3623

Well-known member
Even if it's not visible from within A/UX, you should at least be able to restart into the System 7.0.1 MacPartition and change the Startup Disk from there (I agree that a drive larger than 2 GB or formatted with a 3rd-party tool w/ its own driver like FWB might not mount in A/UX). 

Now, if you want to boot into an HFS+ partition (7.5.5 and up), it probably won't show up under 7.0.1 either; in that case, hold Shift-Ctrl-Opt+<SCSI ID #> before boot chime to force it before an old OS cuts in line.

I had no problems with A/UX on my SE/30 seeing other Mac OS drives but my Q950 was blind to them. I did as above (booting twice - once onto MacPartition, and again after changing the startup disk).

EVEN IF if you were able to see the other drives in A/UX, I found its Startup Disk applet can't be trusted. I was much better off using "System Picker" to switch back and forth.

Whew! This is hard stuff... but once you get things working and tweaked the way you want, you shouldn't have to touch it (and SCSI2SD makes it so easy to make backups)

 

pb3623

Well-known member
The link I posted seemed to describe a walk through for how to set this up.   http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/os/aux/.   Once I have my Mac IIx up and running I was going to try either a 4GB card, or a larger card set up as multiple drives, with SCSI 0 mapped to the first "drive".   Then partition the 4GB drive as they describe.  I'm going to have to track down LaCie Silverlining 5.8.3 to see if that works better than the patched HD SC that I currently use.


This is pretty much how I had one of my cards:  the A/UX slices on ID 0, System 7.6.1 on ID 1, Mac OS 8.1 & 8.5 on ID 2 and a standalone "Apps" partition on ID 3. At some point I had an Emergency boot partition sharing Apps just in case the MacPartition got messed up (and it was a quick way to run DIsk First Aid on the entire estate). I can PM you that SCSI2SD config.XML tonight if you wanted to take a peek. 

 

unxmaal

Well-known member
Whew! This is hard stuff
Agreed. 

I spent most of August fighting what turned out to be a bad 'dd' image. It seems that Quadra 950s are extremely picky about partition layouts and boot ordering. In some cases I've simply not been able to boot an image, no matter what. 

This was the other reason for avoiding multiple OSes or multiple SD card configs with this particular project: it's really difficult and discouraging to experience a failure with a cycle time of hours, repeatedly. With the existing project, we have a minimum viable deploy that nearly always works, and that is simple enough to troubleshoot.

 

Realitystorm

Well-known member
Agreed. 

I spent most of August fighting what turned out to be a bad 'dd' image. It seems that Quadra 950s are extremely picky about partition layouts and boot ordering. In some cases I've simply not been able to boot an image, no matter what. 

This was the other reason for avoiding multiple OSes or multiple SD card configs with this particular project: it's really difficult and discouraging to experience a failure with a cycle time of hours, repeatedly. With the existing project, we have a minimum viable deploy that nearly always works, and that is simple enough to troubleshoot.
Sounds like a plan, get it working with a standalone install, can play with multi-boot later.

 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
Then again, you really wanted to buy the SCSI2SD v6. I can tell; do you really need an excuse?   :)
Affirmative, I already have too way many toys including a nice selection of working SCSI drives and a handful of the little UltraSCSI Savvios. $100 is a significant chunk of the limited toy budget. Not so bad as predicaments go. ;)

 

Realitystorm

Well-known member
Ugh, just found another hurdle, was doing some work on my own image files, and discovered something.... 4GB cards don't always hold the same number of bytes, not sure why.... I have two 4GB cards, one that is 4,024,434,688 bytes, and another that is only 3,965,186,048 bytes.  I've updated my blog entry to include the byte size of the images with a requirement that the reader check the byte size of their card before using the images.   I was getting an error writing my image and couldn't figure out why until I discovered the new card was slightly smaller than the card I created the image from.

 

MOS8_030

Well-known member
The the final formatted volume size varies because every storage device has some bad sectors that will get locked out during formatting thus causing the volume size to vary slightly from device to device.

 

Realitystorm

Well-known member
The the final formatted volume size varies because every storage device has some bad sectors that will get locked out during formatting thus causing the volume size to vary slightly from device to device.
Hmm, I thought that would change the available formatted space, not the reported total capacity of the device.  I'd have to read up on how SD cards deal with bad sectors, is there something on the SD card itself that get's updated to reflect the bad sectors that get's polled by the OS?   Either way this will impact the ability to create these "generic" image files for writing to SD cards.

 

MOS8_030

Well-known member
The bad sectors or memory spaces can be locked out at the factory prior to formatting. Different chips from different manufactures can also have different total capacities as well.

Every memory chip is manufactured with "extra" memory space to account for bad areas in the chip. These bad memory spaces get scanned/tested and locked out when the chip tested at the factory. If a memory chip has too many bad memory spaces it will get down graded (I.e. for example a 4mb chip will be sold as a 2mb.)

The full explanation is more complex but that's a thumbnail of the process.

Bottom line, total usable capacity will vary among devices, magnetic or solid state, so any software you're working on must take that into account, as you have discovered. :)

 
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pb3623

Well-known member
The image we've created is approximately 7 GB - 2 GB for the MacPartition (for bootstrapping) and main A/UX slices, and 5 GB for the Jagubox mirror and other preinstalled/updated binaries mounted as /opt.

We recommend writing to an 8 GB card; doing so will leave some space at the end, to be sure... but that whitespace should cover pretty much all 8 GB cards, even with a significant number of bad sectors.

 

Realitystorm

Well-known member
The bad sectors or memory spaces can be locked out at the factory prior to formatting. Different chips from different manufactures can also have different total capacities as well.

Every memory chip is manufactured with "extra" memory space to account for bad areas in the chip. These bad memory spaces get scanned/tested and locked out when the chip tested at the factory. If a memory chip has too many bad memory spaces it will get down graded (I.e. for example a 4mb chip will be sold as a 2mb.)

The full explanation is more complex but that's a thumbnail of the process.

Bottom line, total usable capacity will vary among devices, magnetic or solid state, so any software you're working on must take that into account, as you have discovered. :)
Thanks, looks like I'll need to redo my image files a bit smaller than the max capacity of the SD card to be on the safe side.

 

pb3623

Well-known member
I think we're at the point where 8 GB cards are virtually inexpensive enough to pick up by the handful. Not being able to find any 8's at Best Buy this weekend, I spent less than $30 for TWO 32GB cards and I didn't even check Amazon.

Sure, 4 GB cards will work but I just don't see a lot of them in circulation these days unless you retire an Android phone or tablet. 

 

Realitystorm

Well-known member
I think we're at the point where 8 GB cards are virtually inexpensive enough to pick up by the handful. Not being able to find any 8's at Best Buy this weekend, I spent less than $30 for TWO 32GB cards and I didn't even check Amazon.

Sure, 4 GB cards will work but I just don't see a lot of them in circulation these days unless you retire an Android phone or tablet. 
I've updated my image files so the max size is now 2GB, you can write the image files to the first 2GB of the card, and set up those first 2GB as Device 1, then divvy up the remaining portion of the card how you want with device 2 etc.  

I did a test with a 16GB card with the 2GB "drive" and a 14GB "drive", worked great.  I updated my blog entry to recommend this approach for users of the SCSI2SD card.  http://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/01/05/setting-up-your-vintage-classic-68k-macintosh-using-a-scsi2sd-adapter/   Using DD you should be able to read/write the different devices by setting the start and end for the DD read/write.   Plan to experiment some more.

 

bamdad

Well-known member
hi everyone,

so i tested the image on my iici, and after fiddling around a bit, it works. after booting the system 7.5.3's 'disk tools' image and clicking 'update in 'apple hd sc setup' it seems to work fine.

the a/ux startup part always fails with '/dev/default NO WRITE' run fsck manually etc., even though the fs is fine.

also, ssh doesn't want to connect, it just drops the attempt after 'debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_INIT sent'. still investigating this.

all in all, this is an awesome effort, and once i find out what is causing the problems, i'll document my findings here.

all the best,

bamdad

 

pb3623

Well-known member
I’m on travel in DC this week but @unxmaal or I will get with you on this for details. If A/UX Startup is failing, how are you getting to the point where you see SSH is failing as well?

If you are somehow making it to the shell, can you post the output of `ps -ef` ?

 

bamdad

Well-known member
thanks for responding so quickly. : )

actually, it boots just fine.. the filesystem stays marked dirty for some reason, so the boot process is stopped every time, but after running fsck manually (which finds no problems) and then `launch`, it's all good.

i think sshd is acting weird because it's really old: i tried connecting from an old ibook g4 with tiger and it was painfully slow but it worked.

what should i grep for in the output of `ps -ef`? if /usr/local/sbin/sshd is what you're looking for, it's running.. i even get a console message popup on the A/UX login screen from sshd for each connection attempt, so it's not a problem with my network or the daemon.

cheers,

bamdad

 

bamdad

Well-known member
hmm, seems like on this fancy new interface i can't even edit my posts.. or i'm just a total dumbass.

anyway, the weirdest thing is this:

Code:
root@3ci:/root# /usr/local/bin/ssh localhost
The authenticity of host 'localhost (127.0.0.1)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 74:55:98:b1:c8:87:43:de:71:46:16:ea:d5:0e:d7:b0.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'localhost' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Write failed: Broken pipe
root@3ci:/root# /usr/local/bin/ssh localhost
root@localhost's password: 
Read from socket failed: Connection reset by peer
there is a 2-3 minute delay between executing the command and receiving a response to it. now i work with UNIX systems every day, so i know my way around most of the issues like permission problems on ~/.ssh and problems with the config file.. but this thing baffles the hell out of me.

same crap happens with a non-root user. this makes me think that it's not a new<>old ssh protocol/encryption type problem but.. something else..

 

bamdad

Well-known member
okay i'll stop spamming this topic now, sorry, but after this i really have no idea:

Code:
mango:~ mobile$ echo | telnet 10.10.10.55 22
Trying 10.10.10.55...
Connected to 10.10.10.55.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.
mango:~ mobile$ ssh root@10.10.10.55

***minutes pass***

Connection closed by 10.10.10.55
i think i'm going to try to compile another version of sshd from source, too bad it takes eons on a 68030 : )

 
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