Am I making 800k floppies correctly? Unable to Load ProDos error

[LimeiBook86]

Hello everyone,

I setup my IIGS (ROM 1 with an accelerator, SCSI, and RAM card) last night along with my PowerBook G3 (Mac OS 8.6). I was able to make a floppy of the Apple SCSI Utilities disk on the PowerBook and boot the IIGS up from the floppy to successfully format a Zip 100 disk as a hard drive.

My next step was trying to make System 6 (GS/OS) disks to install it on the Zip disk. I used the Apple Legacy Recovery CD in my PowerBook to access the GS/OS disk images. But when I tried to make floppies every other disk image failed! (Using DiskCopy 6.3.3)

Eventually I was able to make all the disks except "Install" and "System". I was using DiskCopy 6.3.3 and it gave me a message that said there was a problem with the image (not with the disk) about 90% through the process. Re-trying again didn't help, I could "convert" the disk image to another file and then make the disk, which worked fine, but the Apple II still wouldn't boot.

Oddly enough in both cases, if I put the disk back in it mounts, with what looks like the files intact, but the IIGS won't boot (Says "Unable to load ProDos" on the Install disk). I have a stack of new 800k disks, so I know it's not the disks. I tried to use DiskDup+, but it doesn't seem to want to open or read the disk images (.IMG format).

So my question is - can DiskDup+ read .IMG files? Is there anything special I have to do to make this work?

I tried to insert the "Apple II Setup Disk" and the IIGS said it's not a system disk. So at least (I can assume) the other disks are written to properly. The disk images verify in DiskCopy, but won't write to the floppy it seems. I can bring out another old Mac (I have a IIci or a PowerBook Duo 230) to try and make disks... but as I recall I had this "Unable to Load ProDos" messages before when I tried this years back.

Thanks!
-Steve

 

[david__schmidt]

So my question is - can DiskDup+ read .IMG files? Is there anything special I have to do to make this work?

.IMG isn't any kind of standard, so it's hard to tell if it would be supported or not.  But my guess is it probably is.  One thing isn't clear to me yet: are you specifically booting a floppy (PR#5) vs. just letting the system boot from the Zip disk - which I assume is in slot 7 - which probably doesn't have PRODOS.SYSTEM copied to it yet?

It's just an unlucky turn of events that disks without a PRODOS.SYSTEM on them are the ones you can't create.  That's all you really need in order to make a disk bootable.  (Of course, you also have to know exactly which disk/slot is actually being booted, as noted above...)

 

[LimeiBook86]

.IMG isn't any kind of standard, so it's hard to tell if it would be supported or not.  But my guess is it probably is.  One thing isn't clear to me yet: are you specifically booting a floppy (PR#5) vs. just letting the system boot from the Zip disk - which I assume is in slot 7 - which probably doesn't have PRODOS.SYSTEM copied to it yet?

It's just an unlucky turn of events that disks without a PRODOS.SYSTEM on them are the ones you can't create.  That's all you really need in order to make a disk bootable.  (Of course, you also have to know exactly which disk/slot is actually being booted, as noted above...)

Sorry for any confusion. I have also tried to boot the floppy disks without the Zip drive connected. So I took that out of the equation. The Zip disk has been formatted into 4 (32MB) ProDos partitions, but is currently blank. The goal is to eventually install GS/OS on there.

Therefore there is either a problem with the disk images I'm using, or the way they are being written. I found the archive of older Apple downloads, so I'm going to download those files (they are in sea.bin format), and see if I have better luck from those.

I'll report back tonight with an update. If all else fails I did get the GS to boot via ADT, but at the time I didn't have enough RAM for GS/OS, thus it failed to install.

 

[david__schmidt]

If all else fails I did get the GS to boot via ADT, but at the time I didn't have enough RAM for GS/OS, thus it failed to install.

There's your solution... just use ADTPro to build yourself an 800k disk (ADTPro-2.0.0.po) and boot that, escape to BASIC, and then you can CAT the disks you created and see if they're totally hosed or are just missing PRODOS.SYSTEM.

 

[NJRoadfan]

Another option is Disk Copy 4.2 if the images are still in the older format. For some reason Disk Copy 6.3 is really flaky with making 800k disks.

Since you have a Mac, the sea.bin files on Apple's site shouldn't be a problem. They are self extracting images that are in Disk Copy 4.2 format if I recall.

Also ADTPro with 2IMG format images works really well. No need to mess with Apple's Mac specific image format (or resource forks!) and 2IMG copies of GS/OS installer disks is easy to find.

You only need Disks 1 to 6. The Apple II Setup disk is for Appleshare servers.