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Formating, as i understood it, a Toshiba 6007 MB from Windows 7 Ultimate for Powerbook 150 ?

Roarke

Member
Please tell me if understand this right.

I must format the hdd to fat32 (already is) and than from inside Powerbook 150 i will format fat32 to HFS plus, but wikipedia say that Powerbook 150 had System 7, which is not formated with HFS plus, as HFS+ came only with Mac OS 8 ?

Partitions must be up to 2 GB in my Toshiba hdd for the mac to work. and i have two partitions as fat32.

In my case my local disk (I:) must be partitioned in two further. I will end up with three fat32 partitions. I made a screenshot.

My hdd :

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/56101-actuator-arm-moving-when-i-move-my-hdd-in-my-hand/&tab=comments#comment-596358

Can i just put this files on the formated fat32 hdd and Powerbook 150 will formated further ?

http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/users/olawlor/mac/mac_PB_150.html

In a screenshot i took shows the files decompresed from the .sit file from the above site, with the unar in wondows 7 Ultimate (i don't used WinImage 9.0, as it won't open it).

All are in a Utilities folder, Trash is empty, System Folder has files in it, Desktop Folder has a Desktop Saver folder, wich is empty.

I read somewhere that is important that the file retain theyr 0 KB size, wich newer StuffIt Expander versions in windows won't do.

tosh.PNG

ggg.PNG

 
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bibilit

Well-known member
IIRC the Powerbook 150 was supplied with a set of utilities for HD formating.

The PWB 150 is the first unit using IDE instead of SCSI, so those disk were used to install the System.

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
Can i just put this files on the formated fat32 hdd and Powerbook 150 will formated further ?
I'm not sure what you're asking here. The files on that site need to either be dragged to a blank Mac-formatted floppy (the .SIT file) on a real Mac or imaged onto a blank 1.44 MB floppy using raw binary imaging software (rawrite/dd/etc) on a PC, and then that floppy needs to be booted on the Powerbook 150. You can't just somehow put these files on a FAT formatted/partitioned hard drive and have them do anything.

In principle it *might* be possible to fully prep the hard disk to boot the Powerbook using a PC by using some obscure combination of low-level formatting tools and a Mac emulator, IE, bypassing ever having to make a floppy, but it won't be easy. (Years and years ago I tried using BasiliskII on a Linux machine equipped with a SCSI controller to set up a hard disk to boot a Quadra 650 and I can't actually remember if I succeeded or not.)

 

Roarke

Member
I'm not sure what you're asking here. The files on that site need to either be dragged to a blank Mac-formatted floppy (the .SIT file) on a real Mac or imaged onto a blank 1.44 MB floppy using raw binary imaging software (rawrite/dd/etc) on a PC, and then that floppy needs to be booted on the Powerbook 150. You can't just somehow put these files on a FAT formatted/partitioned hard drive and have them do anything.

In principle it *might* be possible to fully prep the hard disk to boot the Powerbook using a PC by using some obscure combination of low-level formatting tools and a Mac emulator, IE, bypassing ever having to make a floppy, but it won't be easy. (Years and years ago I tried using BasiliskII on a Linux machine equipped with a SCSI controller to set up a hard disk to boot a Quadra 650 and I can't actually remember if I succeeded or not.)
But if i put a formated empty hdd on the Powerbook 150, tools will appear from the Mac ? The programs reside in memory ? Because the former Mac hdd is dead. I don't have a floopy drive either.

 
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Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
But if i put a formated empty hdd on the Powerbook 150, tools will appear from the Mac ?
No. The Powerbook's firmware has absolutely no idea how to boot from a PC formatted hard drive. As I said, the contents of those files are a minimal System file (just barely enough to boot the Mac) and some tools to accomplish tasks like formatting the hard drive, which are intended to be booted from a floppy. (Which, again, you can create on PC using OS-appropriate tools, or a modern Mac for that matter if you can lay hands on a USB floppy drive. On the other side of the equation, doesn't the PB150 have a built-in floppy drive?) Once you have the drive formatted with this minimal tools floppy you still need to install a full OS; there are various ways to handle this but assuming you don't have either an Appletalk network or a compatible SCSI CD-ROM drive you'll probably need to generate a set of installation floppies for 7.5.5 or whatever version you want.

So, no guarantees, but here's an idea that *could* work for you if you have a PC or whatever that you can attach your laptop hard drive to using an adapter. (It looks like you can because you had it on your Windows 7 machine?) Here is "dd" for Windows:

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd
 

It's the aforementioned utility that lets you copy a binary disk image directly to a raw device. (If you're making Floppies on Windows most people use "rawrite", but it doesn't look like it supports targeting hard drives. This "dd" port apparently does, can't vouch for it, never used it. Be aware that making a typo in DD can *really* ruin your day.) Once you have that, well:

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

Here is a guy who's created a bunch of pre-configured disk images in sizes up to 2GB that have partition tables already created and a working "universal" installation of MacOS 7.5.5 already installed. In principle all you'll need to do is DD one of those images onto the root device (not into one of the existing FAT partitions!) with the drive installed in your PC; when you move it over to the Powerbook it should boot right up.

The downside is that because the image was created with a partition table set up for a 2GB device you'll waste the rest of your 6GB hard drive. If you want to use the whole hard drive the same guy has this page here:

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

Which lists some Mac emulators that are capable of creating virtual disk images that have partition tables. (BasiliskII and vMac *don't* have partition tables on their disk images for reasons I don't want to bother explaining.) In principle you could create a just-smaller-than-6GB blank image partitioned how you want it with one of those, copy the OS you want to one of the partitions, bless it, and then copy *that* image over to your HD with DD.

The only other option I can think of if you *really* don't want to mess with floppies is install your drive (again, with an adapter) in an old desktop Mac that has IDE, a CD-ROM drive, and will run an OS compatible with the Powerbook. (IE, maybe something like a Quadra 630 or Power Mac 6200.) There's no getting around having to do something arcane otherwise.

 

Roarke

Member
Thank you, i will try on my other machine (windows xp, as i read further, softmac runs on xp). I discovered the emaculation site and i manage with the users help there, to run BasiliskII and Fusion.

 
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