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A/UX install from SCSI2SD

cofford

Active member
Hello,

I’m trying to install A/UX on my IIfx.  I don’t have a CD-ROM drive, so I’ve set up one device on a SCSI2SD as a CD-ROM (2048/400000/781MB) and wrote the A/UX iso to the card using dd.  In System 7.6 I can see the CD-ROM device in SCSIProbe, but I can’t mount it.  The A/UX install disk can’t find the CD.  Any idea what I’m missing?

Thanks,

Casey

 

ttb

Well-known member
I don't have an answer yet, but I am looking on doing this myself so I will document what I do and if I have more luck than you I'll let you know what worked.

 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
I managed to get this working before.  My image was a .toast file.  I think this is what I did, but I can't entirely remember—I should reproduce it and write it up.

1. Mount the toast image

2. Create a scsi2sd hard disk partition (not CD-ROM!).  I can't remember what other settings were needed here, but setting it to hard disc makes life easy, because A/UX is picky about CD-ROMs but not hard discs.

3. dd the attached disc device over to the scsi2sd partition

4. boot from it.

I can definitely assure you it does work, because I had to do this to install it as my CD-ROM drives are all broken.  You might just have to fiddle with the settings a bit.

 

cofford

Active member
Sweet, I got this working this morning with a SCSI2SD CD-ROM device.  I set up device 2 as a hard disk, initialized it with HD SC Setup, mounted the boot disk image, and copied the files to the SCSI2SD disk.  Boots up and installs!

SCSI2SD CD-ROM settings below:

image.png

 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
I wonder if this technique would work using a Zip disk or Jaz disk for the installer. I’ll have to give this a try !

 

ttb

Well-known member
@cofford, what did you do to get the device to initialize with HD SC Setup? I've never managed to initialize any of my SCSI2SDs (V5.1 and V6) with the patched version of HD SC setup. It just sits there "checking format" forever. Lido or silverlining works every time, though.

This is relevant to this thread as I managed to get mine booting from the floppy and reading the CD image using the same setup you describe. However if I do an easy install, the installer partitions and tries to format the drive, presumably using similar routines to HD SC Setup. Thus, it's been stuck on "Initializing file systems..." for half an hour.

I'm half-inclined to try using Lido to partition and format it for A/UX and then see if I can custom install without formatting, but figured since you got it to work I should ask first.

 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
what did you do to get the device to initialize with HD SC Setup? I've never managed to initialize any of my SCSI2SDs (V5.1 and V6) with the patched version of HD SC setup. It just sits there "checking format" forever. Lido or silverlining works every time, though.


Bear in mind that the A/UX HD SC Setup is a different beast from the MacOS HD SC Setup, even though it shares the same name and most of the same UI.  It's much less picky about which discs it talks to, for starters, and it seems to have less reservations about letting you muck about with partitions.

 

ttb

Well-known member
Shortly after I posted that it actually finished. It chugged through the rest of the install without issue and booted into A/UX. This is the first time I've booted A/UX 3 on an SE/30 with a 50MHz PowerCache and it seems surprisingly usable compared to my past experience. Boots in about 2 and a half minutes.

 

ttb

Well-known member
I haven’t poked all of the corners, but so far no issues. The 3.1 update installed fine and it’s on the internet now. 
 

I did try popping in the Turbo 040 to see when it would fail. The A/UX launcher runs until the point where it switches from the Mac boot environment to A/UX and the whole thing freezes hard (e.g. no mouse movement). I know I’ve read here it didn’t work but I had to see it for myself :)  

 
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