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Imaging a 68K Mac's hard disk for basilisk/mini vMac

sunder

Well-known member
Do we have a way to take a 68K Mac's SCSI hard drive and turn it into a virtual disk for use with either Basilisk II or Mini vMac?

(I know of the copyrom program for ROMs and obviously, Disk Copy can be used to make floppy images.)

I've got a nice setup on a Mac hard drive I'd like to be able to bring with me on my MBP. :b&w:

 

techknight

Well-known member
if you look around various places, youll find the mac copy of norton utilities 2, it contains a program called norton backup.

From here, you could backup your entire hard disk into a norton backup image. Then you can boot your emulator with a boot disk/CD, run norton backup, and "restore" the image onto a virtual hard disk file for the emu.

There are probably easier ways, but this way works too.

Method 2 is to create a disk copy image big enough to hold everything, drag it all into there and save the image. The image could then be open and copied all back of in the emulator. But norton backup will restore your file structures and your desktop file as well.

 

protocol7

Well-known member
You can image it with Disk Copy 6.3.3. Make the image read/write and uncompressed. In order to do this you'll need to boot from a floppy or CD as you can't completely image a running system. You'll also need a destination for the image. In my case, I save it to a network folder via Appleshare.

Depending on the size of the hard disk you may need one of the later Disk Copy betas (like 6.5) as 6.3.3 has a disk size limit of 2GB. Later versions can image larger disks by splitting the output image into 2GB segments (which you can later join into one image if you prefer).

If you don't want to image all the free space just opt to create an image from a folder and choose the hard disk root. When it calculates how big the image will be, you can add on whatever extra free space you'd like.

 

Byrd

Well-known member
Another option, probably not as elegant though, is to copy your entire HD contents to an external device (a Zip disk or CD-R is good), find a USB Zip drive/newer Mac to copy the contents to USB/CD etc. You don't need an "image" as such of pre OS X installs, just a reliable method to get the data preserved from one old standard to a newer one :)

I'm considering putting a PCI SCSI card in my Hackintosh for these purposes, I doubt it'll work in OS X, but Windows would do it.

 

sunder

Well-known member
OS X supposedly still supports SCSI. Long as you get a card that it has drivers for, it should be fine. I've seen a few cards at http://eshop.macsales.com/Search/Search.cfm?Ntt=SCSI%20controller&Ntk=Primary&N=0&Ns=P_Popularity|1 though those are very expensive, they will work inside Mac Pro's so should work in a Hackintosh as long as you get one that matches your PCI slots.

It's also a question of finding which chipsets OS X has drivers for. It looks like there are drivers in 10.4, but that's PPC. http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10334774-263.html says to remove certain conflicting drivers under /System/Library/Extensions.

Looking there, I see these two under Lion

drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jun 18 2011 IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily.kext/

drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jun 18 2011 IOSCSIParallelFamily.kext/

And also this, which is one of the Atto SCSI cards: ATTOExpressPCI4.kext

So look in your kext folder and see if you can find another card.

Running this command gives a ton of matches, but most of them are false (i.e. using USB devices under as SCSI), but some look like they might be SCSI cards. So take a look at those and see if you own one, or can find one cheap:

Code:
find /System/Library/Extensions/ -type f -name Info.plist -exec grep -il scsi {} /dev/null \; | more
Some more discussions: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3632202?start=0&tstart=0

 

24bit

Well-known member
If you dont mind disassembling your vintage Mac, SCSI drives can be mounted with BasiliskII version 142 for Windows,

given you got some working SCSI HA installed in your Windows box.

I mounted an external HDD and some MOs that way, some time ago.

Of course this is only possible for HFS and not for HFS+ drives.

The DiskCopy way might be the easiest, though.

 

tecneeq

Well-known member
If you have a PC with some kind of SCSI-Interface: Shut down the system, attach the disk, boot some modern linux, then create your image with a command like that:

dd bs=10M if=/dev/sdx of=/home/username/scsi-disk.image

You would have to replace x with the disks device and /home/username to a directory you can write to. Think NFS or mounted Windowsshare.

 
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