Color Classic doesn't boot off external HD

[EvieSigma]

I somehow messed up the boot partition on my SCSI2SD in my Color Classic and made it unbootable, so I figured I'd just use my external SCSI HDD with System 7.1 (and the required enabler) installed to boot the Color Classic and re-bless the system folder or whatever else I'd need to do to restore functionality. However, when I try to boot off the external HD it just does this:

It freezes like that forever and the drive activity light on the HDD never even blinks. What's even stranger is that I have this same problem with two different logic boards (the original board which has been recapped and a LC 550 board which hasn't). I tried the drive with another machine and it showed signs of being accessed like it should be. What the heck is going on?

 

[EvieSigma]

I can't edit the post...it turns out my SD card became corrupted somehow and wiped out all my hard drive partitions so I get to reinstall System 7.5.5 all over again. Yay!

 

[EvieSigma]

Well, I'll use this thread for something sorta related. I have a .dsk image of a complete 7.5.5 install with helpful programs added that I want to put on my SCSI2SD. However, the method I was given (use SoftMac to create and initialize an image file and then put the install onto it) isn't working for me because SoftMac just won't work (compatibility issues with Windows 10?) Is there some other way I can make a .img file with this .dsk file that will be initalized and bootable in my Color Classic? I have a 2GB sized .dsk image and a 2GB blank .img image.

Here are the guides I was trying to follow:

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

http://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/08/19/setting-up-your-vintage-classic-68k-macintosh-partitioning-your-hard-drive/

http://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/05/28/setting-up-your-vintage-classic-68k-macintosh-creating-your-own-boot-able-disk-image/

http://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/09/10/setting-up-your-vintage-classic-68k-macintosh-using-softmac/

 

[CC_333]

Hmm, SoftMac, if it's the one I'm thinking, goes back a *loong* time! I think the newest release was sometime around 2004 or 2005?

Anyway, if you have a VM with an older version of Windows installed (or the means to set one up), you could probably run SoftMac in there?

Other than that, I've read that Basilisk or Mini vMac both work well for this purpose, and those should work on Windows 10, as far as I know (sometimes I wonder if *anything* works on 10 anymore, seeing as virtually every release seems to be riddled with showstopping bugs).

c

 

[Gorgonops]

Other than that, I've read that Basilisk or Mini vMac both work well for this purpose, and those should work on Windows 10...

Neither BasiliskII nor Mini vMac are particularly good for this because they both always treat virtual disks as if they were gigantic floppies. Therefore your can't run the tools necessary to create a valid disk/partition label which you'll need to have on the SD card.

(It is barely possible to pull this off in BasiliskII if you can convince it to treat your SD card as a generic scsi device because this *will* expose it to BasiliskII in such a way that it "looks like" a SCSI drive for Drive Setup, but that's really picky to make work and it usually only works at all under Linux.)

If you can't get SoftMac to run than you can probably do it in MAME, as outlined here:

http://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/12/26/setting-up-your-vintage-classic-68k-macintosh-using-mame/

Just fair warning, MAME is really unpleasant and arcane to set up compared to any other Mac emulator. The last time I played with it the Mac emulation was also horrendously buggy. (As late as 2015 it couldn't even boot System 7. I guess that's fixed? Hard to tell because the documentation is so bad.)

 

[EvieSigma]

I wish there was an easier way to do this but I don't know how...not unless I could hook up a crossover cable to the Ethernet card and use that 7.5 network access disk to initialize and write to the SD card.

 

[K Trueno]

That’d be slow but it would work.  

I don’t have a SCSI2SD yet but if the concepts are the same you should be able to image the SD card from Windows with a known good .img file.  Something like https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/windows.md that works for the RaspberryPi folks is the same concept, skipping the SoftMac(!) VM madness.  Of course this is easier with an OSX machine with dd and mounting the drive.  

Take with grain of salt as I have not tried it myself.

 

[EvieSigma]

Well that's the problem I have, I have a .dsk hard disk image but I don't know how to turn it into a .img image and still have it work.

I do have an OS X machine I could use dd with but then how do I initialize the SD card?

 

[K Trueno]

Not sure what you mean.  If you DL http://www.savagetaylor.com/wp-content/uploads/68k_Macintosh/Setup/Bootdisks/OS_755_500MB.zip, unzip it, you get a .dsk file.  You then dd that onto the SD card which should be bootable.  Again, I don't have SCSI2SD but I assume thats how it works.

BTW, not sure what you mean with the extensions.  You can mount the .dsk image, its just a HFS image.  For example, if you renamed the .dsk from extracted from that zip file to .img in OSX then double click it, it will mount and you can see its contents.  Won't be able to modify it tho as OSX > 10.6 can't write to it.

 

[EvieSigma]

Alright, I'll have to try out dd with my iBook G4 (running Tiger) and see if it works. Either it works or it doesn't.

 

[EvieSigma]

Well...it didn't work. The dd-ing worked but it doesn't boot. I have a system folder and such on the SD card but it must not be blessed or something? When I boot off a Disk Tools disk there's nothing detected, and for some reason I can't get patched HD SC Setup 7.3.5 to fit on a Disk Tools floppy.

 

[EvieSigma]

Okay, I started over, re-initializing the disk into two <4GB Mac OS Standard partitions using the OS 9 version of Drive Setup but otherwise using this guide:





However, when I boot off a 7.5.3 Disk Tools disk my partitions don't show up. They show up just fine in OS 9 and OS X but on the actual machine using the SCSI2SD they're not there, in fact, when I use the patched version of HD SC Setup on my external HD with a System 7 install it recognizes Device 0's existence but there's no desktop icons to click on.

 

[K Trueno]

Sorry I don't have any more ideas: I haven't done it myself and was just going off my understanding and guides.   I have an SCSI2SD on the way for a CC too but until I get to play with it I probably can't help anymore.

Tho one last thing:

They show up just fine in OS 9

When you say OS 9, is it as a SCSI2SD or directly to the SD card?

 

[EvieSigma]

I ended up fixing it thanks to an image provided by @IlikeTech. They gave me a 7.6.1 image that worked after being dd'ed to the card.

 

[K Trueno]

Nice, glad you got it figured out.  I guess it was the image that was bad.  

 

[IlikeTech]

Okay so some important info is that you can't just DD a raw HFS filesystem to the card.  You need a driver as well.

http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/HFSFromScratch

These are the instructions I used to create the Image after installing 7.6 with BasiliskII.

IlikeTech

 

[K Trueno]

Oh sorry I lead you astray @EvieSigma!  

Thanks @IlikeTech replying and clearing that up.  Now time to read about what a SCSI Driver/Partition is.... (makes for good bedtime reading  ;-) )

 

[IlikeTech]

Sounds good.  It's created by whatever formatting software you use.  The disk image I sent Evie is made with a Lido driver image, the one linked on the site.

 

[Realitystorm]

Well...it didn't work. The dd-ing worked but it doesn't boot. I have a system folder and such on the SD card but it must not be blessed or something? When I boot off a Disk Tools disk there's nothing detected, and for some reason I can't get patched HD SC Setup 7.3.5 to fit on a Disk Tools floppy.

I'll take a look at the image, last time I tested it the file worked for me.

One thing I've noticed causing people issues, with SCSI2SD they forget to update the configuration information on their SCSI2SD adapter to match the size of their card if they swap it out, so the start and ends of the partitions don't match up.

Also if you use the 500MB image on a 2Gig card you need to config your SCSI2SD card so drive 0 has the right sector size.  See step 3.1   http://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/01/05/setting-up-your-vintage-classic-68k-macintosh-using-a-scsi2sd-adapter/

I'll have to take a look at the HFDISK utility the HFSFromScratch site links to, looks promising http://www.codesrc.com/gitweb/index.cgi?p=hfdisk.git;a=summary