Broken system - boot from floppy

[maiden30403]

Hi I had a Mac Classic II working great and never backed up my important things to floppy, is there any way of booting the mac from a floppy and taking the floppy out to write to another floppy. Or can I put the SCSI drive into my RAID config on my PC and copy the info across that way? Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[tomlee59]

Your question is very confusing. You seem to have a hard disk, yet you talk about wanting to boot from a floppy. Is the HD not bootable? That is, is it damaged somehow, and your objective is to salvage the data on it? If the HD is damaged, then simply booting from a floppy may not solve your problem. You have to repair the HD to the point where you can get at the data in question.

If it's a simple problem, then running a utility like Norton or even Disk First Aid might solve your problem. If it's more serious, then there may not be recoverable data, in which case, booting from a floppy will do nothing for you.

If you *can* boot from the HD, and all you want is just to make a copy of a floppy, that's straightforward: copy its contents onto the HD, remove the source floppy, insert a target floppy, and copy to it.

If you have no HD (which you initially seemed to be implying, because you mentioned wanting to boot from a floppy), then the floppy itself must be bootable. Plus, you will need a copy of Disk Copy on it. That doesn't leave a whole lot of space for files, but whatever you can squeeze on it can be backed up easily. Boot from the floppy, run Disk Copy, and follow the onscreen directions. Depending on how much RAM you have, a certain amount of disk swapping could be involved, but with a Classic II, it shouldn't be too onerous.

Maybe this isn't the answer to your question, so if indeed that's true, then please post back with more info. In particular, please tell us:

1) What you really want to do. Are you determined to back up floppies onto other floppies, or hard disk files onto floppies, and only floppies? Or do you simply want to back up the hard disk's contents onto anything that makes sense? How many files? Megabytes' worth? Gigabytes? The "backup onto floppies" method is not practical for large volumes of data, of course.

2) What you have to work with. Is the HD in good shape? Is it bootable? Do you have other disks? Zips? Other externals? CD burner?

3) Do you have the Mac on a network? If so, then you have additional options.

Copying Mac files with a PC is a bit tricky because Mac files can have two pieces (called forks), and PC files do not. Just plugging your Mac drive into your PC's RAID could cause problems if you don't know what you're doing, so I recommend against that.

 

[maiden30403]

Sorry I did word that badly.

There is a 80mb hard drive in it and it was working fine but now there's a system error somewhere in the system files and I'm afraid to try a repair as I might loose all the documents that are on it. But when I boot from a floppy I can get at all the information on my harddrive (but they wont open because I don't have word or whatever on the floppy). Really I just want to get all the information backed up before I go any further.

There's only about 4 or 5 3.5" disks worth of stuff as it's all just word documents.

Oh and I don't have a new mac . I have another Mac Classic II but I don't have any networking hardware for either.

 

[equill]

Does your question imply that, in wishing to transfer data from the Classic II to floppy disk, you have turned over a new leaf with respect to backups? Are you just unable to get to the desktop after startup? Or has the Classic II's hard drive carked entirely?

If the last is the case you are in dire straits. Can you not start up from the HDD? You can certainly start up the Mac from a floppy disk, but you cannot remove/unmount a volume that contains the active System in order to write to other floppies in the same drive. Starting up from the HDD and writing to floppy will help retrieve files for you, but as small a hard drive as 40MB is the equivalent of many floppy disks. Even if your HDD is working, your possible courses of action still all involve some expenditure before you can make backups:

an external HDD, system SCSI cable and terminator, or

an external 1.44MB floppy drive, and a bundle of floppy disks, or

transfer of the internal HDD to another Mac equipped with SCSI.

What exactly is it about the internal hard drive that prompts your question?

de

 

[maiden30403]

What exactly is it about the internal hard drive that prompts your question?

It's not actually my box a friend gave it to me who wrote alot of songs and that and they're all saved on his mac (there's several back-ups of them on floppys here but well they were doomed to get exposure to magnets over the last 15 years or so). He just really wants to get all these back again. I got his mac booting again for him by re-sitting everything inside it and he was looking through all his stuff and was thrilled but then it just died!.

Have all the original system disks also but some are damaged.

I am getting a sad mac face and

0000000F
00007FFF

On the screen

 

[equill]

Seemingly, tomlee59 and I were beavering away with answers at the same time. What he has written I concur with, but your amplification narrows the problem somewhat. 0F in the first line under the Sad Mac indicates that there is a software error (a '68K exception'). The codes are not precise enough to say where the error lies, but there is every chance that it may be solved by re-installing the System, or a newer System. Do you have Install diskettes for the Classic II? System 7.5 would do very nicely, especially if there is not the full (and maximum) 10MB of RAM that the Classic II can use. The Install disks will also have Disk First Aid, with which you can verify the data structures of the HDD, and a disk utility with which to reinstall Apple's hard disk driver software.

What software is at your disposal?

de

 

[maiden30403]

Seemingly, tomlee59 and I were beavering away with answers at the same time. What he has written I concur with, but your amplification narrows the problem somewhat. 0F in the first line under the Sad Mac indicates that there is a software error (a '68K exception'). The codes are not precise enough to say where the error lies, but there is every chance that it may be solved by re-installing the System, or a newer System. Do you have Install diskettes for the Classic II? System 7.5 would do very nicely, especially if there is not the full (and maximun) 10MB of RAM that the Classic II can use. The Install disks will also have Disk First Aid, with which you can verify the data structures of the HDD, and a disk utility with which to reinstall Apple's hard disk driver software.
What software is at your disposal?

de

I have 7.0.1, after several tries just now I got the software installed, sort of.

But now I have a different error.

bad F-Line instruction

This appears no matter if extensions are on or off.

Thanks a million for the help so far , I think I may just get this going after all .

 

[equill]

There is a good chance that you will triumph in the end, but I advocate that you not install system software before you have let DFA, and HD SC Setup, do their special things to contain the magic smoke. Run DFA to Verify the HDD, and to Repair it if need be. Repeat the Repair several times if errors continue to be reported, until none is. Then only re-install the System 7.0.1. When the HDD mounts on the desktop with no demur it will be time to grab the files that you need, by copying them to diskette directly.

Bonne chance.

de

 

[maiden30403]

DFA is giving me no errors but HD SC is saying

Problems verifying data on drive

HD mounting with no problems booting from Disk Tools.

 

[equill]

The file directory (the list of pointers to the start location of each file in the data partition of the drive) may be heavily fragmented, or worse, corrupt. DiskWarrior, which is on CD anyway, may not be able to deal with System 7.0.1. Your need now is for NUM (Norton Utilities for Mac), preferably in a 68K-only version such as 3.2 or earlier. With Disk Doctor you should be able to reconstruct the file directory, and, for good measure, use Speed Disk to defragment the files themselves. Then you may be nearly at the end of the yellow brick road.

de

 

[tomlee59]

I second equill's recommendation: Find, and use, a copy of Norton. That's your best option at this point.

 

[maiden30403]

Used norton, it found bad sector, clicked repair and it just showed up the same error next time I did a scan.

Was using NUM Emergency Disk.

Thinking of taking another approach, let me know if it would work.

Could I make a copy of the disk tools floppy (which sees my HDD and the docs I want) and put it on another floppy which isn't protected and copy the data accross using whatever free space is available?

 

[maiden30403]

I got it working, thanks a million for everyone who helped out.

Maybe these steps will be useful for other people.

Used my system install disks to install min. system on another floppy.

Then booted from this floppy and copied the system folder across to HDD replacing files already there.

The install disk didn't work on the hard drive but that did .

 

[equill]

Good for you, and a pleasing outcome of some lateral thinking.

de