How to Install System 7 onto SD Card for SCSI2SD using BasiliskII?

[HeartletTullius]

Hello Everyone,

Following up on everyone's extremely helpful information yesterday, I'm going to try and replace the HD inside my Macintosh SE/30 with a SCSI2SD.

One person told me that you can install System 7 directly onto the SD Card using BasiliskII, and that removes the need for all the floppy disks. I've looked around online, and I can't seem to find any tutorials telling me how to do it.

I have BasiliskII set up and working on my MacBook Pro (2018), so how can I put System 7 onto the SD Card so the Macintosh will boot up with the SDSI2SD?

Also, would this SCSI2SD work with a Macintosh SE/30?

Thank you!

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Basically, you need to find a blank image, use Basilisk to install Mac OS onto it (plenty of guides online on how to do that), and then use dd (terminal) to write it onto the previously set up SD card (standard procedure, use scsi2sd-util for that).

 

[HeartletTullius]

@BadGoldEagle Hey! Thanks for the information! I have a just one questions, if that's not too much trouble! When you refer to "blank image", do you mean a blank OS (e.g. System 7) or do you mean a blank, unformatted SD Card? Then you use that same SD card later to use terminal to install the OS and use in the SCSI2SD for the Macintosh Boot disc? Thanks!

 

[gobabushka]

When creating an image for the sd card, can you just use an HFV image of say 4GB, and just DD it to an sd card?

 

[BadGoldEagle]

@HeartletTullius Blank image as in blank .img or .dsk 'hard disk' image. An image is basically a file that once opened (mounted) behaves just like a normal USB or SD card (i.e. a volume), you can then access its contents just as usual. 

So...

First, open up Disk Utility, select your SD card and take a look at its capacity. You should be able to get its total size in 'bytes'. Copy that number somewhere. 

Then, open up Terminal, and use the following command to create your empty completely blank image:

dd if=/dev/zero of=my_image.dsk count=14336


This creates a 7 Megabyte file, named 'my_image.dsk', in the current directory. 'count' is the number of 512 byte blocks.

from: https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/extras/blanks/

Additionally, you can download pre-made images but they're too small for what you want to do...

Divide the number you got for your SD Card in Disk Utility by 512, and enter that number after 'count='. To be safe, I would remove a few bytes (about 200/300) from the number you got in disk utility.

Warning: The maximum size your image can be depends on the type of mac you're going to install your scsi2sd in. 

- Standard 68k Mac (68000 - 68030) up to SSW 7.1: 2GB (can be mounted on ANY MAC with SCSI)

- Standard 68k Mac (68000 - 68030) SSW 7.5 to 8.1: 4GB (can NOT be mounted on macs with 7.1 or earlier)

- Quadra or PPC: 7.6 onwards: 2TB (CANNOT be mounted on 68030 Macs)

source: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/27346-volume-size-limits-under-hfs-and-hfs/

Since you only want System 7, there's no need to dive into HFS+. 

Then mount your freshly created image in vMac/Basillisk/Sheepshaver... On startup it'll ask you to format the image. Once that's done, start installing System 7. 

@gobabushka I've never used HFV images but that should work. 

 

[gobabushka]

Thank you very much for the walk through! So basicaly I should be able to dd this back to an sd card and use it in a SCSI2SD?

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Yup. Technically, it should work.

And if you want to use a larger pre-made image, download one from this tutorial (I used it to set up my SCSI2SD, and it's a more complete version of what I've written above): http://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/01/05/setting-up-your-vintage-classic-68k-macintosh-using-a-scsi2sd-adapter/