.dsk raw floppy format?

[maz]

Hi forum, does anyone know how I might create, read, and write raw floppy .dsk files (as used by Floppy Emy) on a modern Mac? Alternatively, how do you transfer files from a modern mac to a vintage mac through an sd card with raw disk images?

Thanks in advance!

-- maz

 

[cheesestraws]

I tend to use BasiliskII and its host filesystem access features; I add the disk image I want to modify or add stuff to to the volumes list, boot BII, then just copy things from the Unix pseudo-drive onto it (since copying from a Mac host preserves resource forks and so forth).

There may well be a quicker approach, but I tend to do this as part of a process of testing the software in emulation before putting it on to a floppy image, so my workflow would have to involve BII or minivmac anyway.

 

[maz]

Hi cheesestraws, thanks for the answer. Spent a few hours now trying to get Basilisk to run without luck on my Mjoave machine. Without giving up on that just yet does anyone else use a simple tool to read/write *files* within a .dsk image (just as you would simply mount .img files)?

 

[quorten]

I transfer files from modern PCs or Raspberry Pis (I don't have modern Macs) to classic Macintoshes via serial connection, to state it succinctly.  Typically I have also used the emulator method for creating raw disk images on a modern computer.  I've also used old Linux virtual machines to manipulate .dsk image files, sadly support for resource fork access was removed from modern Linux.  Apparently macOS went down the tube also by dropping support for creating new resource forks.

On macOS, I believe you can try Disk Utility > Open Disk Image, and you should be able to access the HFS volume inside the .dsk image file for creating and editing files.  Or via Terminal, "hdiutil mount floppy.dsk".  I believe the Disk Utility tool and other command line tools provide methods for creating HFS disk image files too, which is the same as ".dsk" if you set the capacity and size accordingly.

 

[quorten]

Another emulator to consider, may be easier to setup than BasiliskII:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software)

More info on working with ".dsk" images:

https://www.gryphel.com/c/image/

For transferring files to a vintage Mac using SD... getting the HFS volume may only be part of the process.  If your SD emulates a floppy disk, that should be all that is needed.  However, if it emulates a hard disk (i.e. SCSI2SD), you also need the Apple Partition Map.

 

[maz]

Hi quorten, thanks for your reply. Couldn't get Executor to run, looks like an experimental/unsupported port from 10 years ago. I have been trying to mount those old disk images using standard tools (hdiutil, diskutil) - if it is an HFS volume inside, they can be mounted and read (not written) by hdiutil, however vintage 68k macs with OS6 can't read those volumes. I really want to avoid setting up a windows PC to move a file from the interwebs to my old mac. What software are you using on your vintage mac to transfer files over serial?

 

[PaulM]

Hi maz, I am not saying this the easiest way but it works for me....I had this stuff laying around anyway so it didn't cost me any extra money....

-- Get a raspberry pi running  linux (debian) on your local network (same network as the modern mac) ... this is a $50 or so investment

-- Does your vintage mac have an ethernet connection? If not -  you can find  Asante SCSI Ethernet adaptors readily on eBay

-- now you can ftp from modern mac to the pi, and from the pi to the vintage

Of course you may be able to set up an FTP server on your modern mac, and then ftp directly, without the pi. For whatever reason I could not get that to work in my situation -- it may be because my modern mac is a corporate machine and I could not get the ftp server working, I can't recall.

 

[nglevin]

I'm confused about this conclusion:

[...] if it is an HFS volume inside, they can be mounted and read (not written) by hdiutil, however vintage 68k macs with OS6 can't read those volumes.

This is incorrect. MFS and HFS are both well supported by System 6; HFS support was supplied in the ROM of the Mac Plus (wikipedia). HFS is readable and writable on Mac OS X from 10.0 to 10.5, before the support for writing to HFS disks was dropped in 10.6.

You might be confusing "HFS" with HFS+ aka HFS Extended, which was introduced in Mac OS 8.1 with some limitations.

Are you using a Mac 128k? That would be the only situation where you need to transfer data as MFS back and forth between your Macs, which is a fair bit more tricky than the HFS route. Otherwise HFS is probably what you want.

 

[Dog Cow]

Hi forum, does anyone know how I might create, read, and write raw floppy .dsk files (as used by Floppy Emy) on a modern Mac?

I run Mac OS X 10.5 with MFS Lives! filesystem kernel extension so I can mount MFS and HFS disks using DiskImageMounter. MFS is read-only with this OS X kernel fs extension, so I use mini vMac if I need to modify MFS disk images.

I don't "write out" disk images to physical floppy disks. Small files get XMODEM transferred via a serial line from the Mac OS X machine directly to the vintage Mac. Large files get put on a Zip disk for sneaker-net transfer.

 

[quorten]

Hi maz, for serial transfers I use ZTerm 0.9 on the Macintosh side and the X/Y/ZMODEM protocol.  ZTerm will automatically pack/unpack MacBinary files which makes it a breeze to transfer applications.  I sent ZTerm over to the vintage side via a floppy disk image.

I found some readymade 1.44 MB disk images containing ZTerm and other free/shareware networking software here:

https://www.jagshouse.com/internet_on_system_6.html

For my purposes I needed to repack ZTerm into an 800K disk image.

 

[maz]

I'm confused about this conclusion:

This is incorrect. MFS and HFS are both well supported by System 6; HFS support was supplied in the ROM of the Mac Plus (wikipedia). HFS is readable and writable on Mac OS X from 10.0 to 10.5, before the support for writing to HFS disks was dropped in 10.6.

You might be confusing "HFS" with HFS+ aka HFS Extended, which was introduced in Mac OS 8.1 with some limitations.

Are you using a Mac 128k? That would be the only situation where you need to transfer data as MFS back and forth between your Macs, which is a fair bit more tricky than the HFS route. Otherwise HFS is probably what you want.

Appreciate the confusion. I don't mean mounting on the vintage mac. I mean mounting an image on a modern mac. I can read and write from and to using Floppy Emu through to the disk images on the sd card, but I am looking for an easy way to move vintage files to and from those disk images (on the sd card or other modern media). When I say "easy" I mean a piece of software to do the transfer rather than going through Windows, Linux, emulators, etc. 

Maybe XMODEM or KERMIT ends up being easiest though.

-- maz

 

[nglevin]

Some of us settled on Mac OS X Leopard Server and VMware Fusion, in the absence of a solution like FuseHFS for the latest Fuse for macOS.

As far as mounting the disk images with a double click in Finder, for any given Mac OS X going at least as far back as when Tiger introduced the file system metadata system that Spotlight is based on, if you change the file extension from "dsk" to "img" then Finder will attempt to mount the image through DiskImageMounter.app. The underlying hdiutil ends up sniffing the file headers and some other bits on the disk image to figure out what the image actually is, it doesn't really care about the file extension.

The best solution for backwards compatibility on Mac OS is to keep some (virtual, actual) machines going with an earlier Mac OS X. As many are finding right now with Catalina.