Best way to bootstrap LC II without floppy?

[johnklos]

I've got an LC II motherboard which Brett B. kindly sent me. It needed a good cleaning and recap, and now it seems to work. I connected the PCD-50B SCSI card reader that I use with my Quadra 605, and although the LED flashes shortly after power on, it won't boot.

It occurred to me that the SCSI drivers installed on a drive might work fine for certain m68k machines, but not others. I'd try some different ones, but I don't want to screw up the working Quadra, plus I don't have a floppy drive for the LC II.

Can anyone recommend a good way to make a bootable disk using the Quadra that will definitely work on the LC II? Or, if not via the Quadra, perhaps from Basilisk II or Mini vMac?

 

[Gorgonops]

I can't think of any reason why a drive formatted by a Quadra wouldn't work in an LCII. Did you use the Apple formatter or something else? Granted this isn't a task I've done often, but I've never been let down by either the version of HD SC setup that comes with the A/UX installer or the patched-with-Resedit one.

Unfortunately neither BasiliskII or Mini vMac are much good for creating a disk format intended for a real Mac because they both do the bit where they replace the ROM floppy driver and essentially treat all disks as giant floppy drives. (Therefore not letting you use the tools that you'd otherwise use to create a partition table.) However, this guy:

http://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/01/05/setting-up-your-vintage-classic-68k-macintosh-using-a-scsi2sd-adapter/

does have some pre-baked disk images designed to be DD-ed onto a raw SD card for use with a SCSI2SD, I imagine you could probably copy them to whatever memory card form factor your reader uses and see if they'll go. (And if you click around his site he also has a tutorial for creating an image with a partition table using MESS; MESS is the worst but this is a place where its talents are useful.)

Still, though... I can't help but wonder if maybe you have a bad SCSI controller *or* there's something about your card reader device that the ROM driver doesn't like? (I don't know what differences there might be between an LCII and a Quadra at that level, but maybe the former is getting confused by some aspect of the drive ID descriptor or something?)

 

[Brett B.]

LCII's in my experience are really picky about what they boot from... I was using an 80MB Quantum drive for testing purposes in the two that I recently fixed.  It came out of one of them originally and was loaded with 7.1 and a bunch of old software from back in the day.  Worked perfectly in one but not the other - it would sit on the happy mac screen for 3-4 minutes and the hard drive would just grind away like crazy, then bomb out on a sad mac screen that was half grey, half black.  So bizarre.  Both machines were recapped and working perfectly but had obviously different logic boards and I think that had something to do with it.  I reformatted the drive and reloaded 7.1 and all was well.  I seem to remember things like that happening before with LCII's.

 

[johnklos]

Just posting for future reference. I eventually got everything working on a 250 meg CompactFlash card in the PCD-50B by using a SCSI2SD set to the same number of sectors as the CF card. For some reason, the CF card in the PCD-50B fails when I try to initialize it using Drive Setup or HD SC Setup (both patched, of course). The SD card in the SCSI2SD worked fine, so I initialized, copied the System Folder and programs, then used dd to copy the SD card to the CF card.

The nice thing is that I can just connect the CF card to my Mac, chown my user /dev/disk2 (or whatever it comes up as in diskutil list), then give /dev/disk2 to Basilisk II, then access the CF card right from Basilisk.