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Mac System 7.0.1 and 7.5.3 floppy images

Cedsrepairs

Well-known member
Hello everyone,

I'm trying to reinstall my PB100 and PB180 on BlueSCSI.
I've got the "pre made" images, that are helpful and thanks for whoever did them, but they don't have any spare disk space left which makes them unusable long term

I'm trying to reinstall both with a Mac System that is period accurate and I chose 7.0.1 and 7.5.3

Even after multiple afternoons of searching, surfing on macintoshgarden or macintoshrepository ; I can't put my hands on a set of floppies images for both, something that would be usable on a PC to write the diskettes? Even after dealing with .SIT, .TOAST and other vintage extensions i'm usually stuck at the fact I end up with diskette images that I can't use on my PC which is the only device with both internet (and acces to those images) and a working floppy drive...

Could anyone point me to, or maybe help me in private, to put my hands on a set of floppies for system7 that I could use with DiskWrite or RaWrite on a modern PC ?
 

BacioiuC

Well-known member
If you have a working floppy drive attached to your PC, a good bet would be to install Basilisk II on it and write the images from Basilisk II. I usually do this.
 

Cedsrepairs

Well-known member
I’ll try that . So the idea is that the emulator is able to access the floppy ? In my case it’s an usb floppy would that even work ?
 

Cedsrepairs

Well-known member
The creation of floppies is much more difficult in the Apple hobby than it is for PC, imho.
If I happen to have them one day, I'll create windows friendly MacOS floppy images to use with rawrite.
 

Cedsrepairs

Well-known member
Ive installed both Basilisk (I've got a running 8.5.6 on a Quadra ) and HVEexplorer in my Windows 11 machine

I got a CDROM from apple full of "img" floppy images mounted in basilisk, and was able to copy the img files on my pc (if needed)

but I couldn't find how to write floppies out of them :(

First of, Basilisk can't access my USB floppy , then I don't know of a Mac software I could run that would write IMG files (and I would need the floppy to work anyway)

Alternatively, as I've got the Mac IMG files on my pc, if there was a way to burn them directly from the PC that would help as well...

I'm just trying to make a bunch of 1.44M floppies with 7.0.1 from a PC and that is an adventure :)
 

Cedsrepairs

Well-known member
Alternatively, I obviously have access to vintage PCs (with a proper floppy drive)
So if there was a software allowing me to write .IMG or TOAST Mac floppy images, from DOS or Windows 95, I could also try to do that

Everything I tried on Windows 11 /USB Floppy failed so far (eg using "macwrite", Hvexplorer, or Basilisk )
 
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Cedsrepairs

Well-known member
And I'm here again one year later, still with the same problem for another Mac...
Maybe someone has a new idea or a method that wasn't discussed ?

Basically, how to produce System7 system floppies (701, 753, etc) from a modern PC (windows 11, usb drive)

Also, it's becoming difficult to find a reliable and understandable source for ISO/IMG of system floppies in the mac worold (it's way easier in the pc world). What would be your recommandations for a good source of floppy images for mac of that era ? (System7)

Thanks to everyone,
 

Phipli

Well-known member
And I'm here again one year later, still with the same problem for another Mac...
Maybe someone has a new idea or a method that wasn't discussed ?

Basically, how to produce System7 system floppies (701, 753, etc) from a modern PC (windows 11, usb drive)

Also, it's becoming difficult to find a reliable and understandable source for ISO/IMG of system floppies in the mac worold (it's way easier in the pc world). What would be your recommandations for a good source of floppy images for mac of that era ? (System7)

Thanks to everyone,
The long and short of it is mac floppy drives aren't like PC floppy drives - macs used to vary the speed of the spin to put more data on the outer tracks, while PC drives were fixed speed.

There are ways writing the flux directly, but it still isn't perfect because you're pushing the capabilities of a fixed speed drive to write data at higher densities than it was designed to. If you want to do this sort of thing cross platform (you're trying to write bootable disks, between platforms, and across more than 30 years), you're much better off using a CD writer, because at least the drives and media were the same.

In short, this is never simple, because PC were never compatible with mac floppy disks.
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
Not sure if you realize, but .toast images are ISOs. Just relabel.

In regards to not having enough space on premade images, their intent is just to get you the minimum. You need to create a blank disk for whatever size you want and copy over the contents to that and reboot.

Mac disk images are not easily written to floppies on a Windows PC because of disk incompatibilities between Mac HFS and DOS/Windows FAT disk formats, in addition to differences in how the drives read and write to them (as Phipli just commented).
 

Phipli

Well-known member
Wait, bluescsi? You don't need floppies? Create an empty 2GB image, put the empty and "premade" image on the bluescsi, set it up as instructed in the manual, boot, copy files to 2GB partition, remove "premade" image. Done?
 

Cedsrepairs

Well-known member
Well first of, I really have to apologize for not being a macintosh power user ; I know it's bizarre to be able to revive vintage laptops and own half a dozen of them in running state, while still being such a software newbie. Let me explain :) While people were using system7 I was using msdos, and here I am now 30 years laters trying to repair and discover Macs of that era (a big part of the hobby for me is to catch up on all those things that either were too expensive or I was too young to own) And when I see how advanced the macs were compared to the PCs I used in the early nineties, I feel wasted part of my life. :) Joke aside ; really, I never used some of the softwares that seems to be ubiquitous for many people (like "toast" and such), I realize people that for people that are using Mac since the nineties this is a bit like Winzip or winrar , but for me it's new (in 2023).

I'll be glad to find a solution thru bluescsi ; most of my macs have a bluescsi - however remember these are laptops : I have to disassemble them entirely to swap the SD card. So I need to really fill up the SD card with many files once and for all, and be sure of what i'm doing.
Is there a way for me to fill in floppy images on a bluescsi harddisk image and then either load them, mount them, as if they were floppies ? That could help in certain scenarios.

What software do I use (on a PC) to add floppy image files to a bluesci image on an sd card ?
Once back in the powerbooks ; which mac software do I need to mount floppy images ?
Is that same software able to write those images to floppy disk (once they'll be running on the mac ?)
Would such a software be able to run on System 7.0.1 ? Although I have access to 8 and a 9 ( PB180 & 5300CS )

I also realize my life would probably be easier if I added an external bluescsi to my powerbooks (with an HDI30 to SCSI DB25) as a means to communicate with the modern world.

And thanks for taking the time to participate in this thread :)
 

Paralel

Well-known member
You want to write classic Mac OS 1.44 MB IMG or DSK files to a USB floppy on a PC? Use RawWrite:


I use it all the time to make floppies for my various classic Macs on various PC laptops using a 20 year old USB floppy drive, never had a problem.

RawWrite does just what the name says, it writes the file it is given as just a stream of raw data to the physical floppy. Since it writes the file without concern for what is in it, etc... formats, file system differences, etc... don't matter.

As far as I know it even writes without concern for whether the floppy has trouble or not. I have only seen it error out once because the floppy was such crap the drive couldn't actually physically write to it. More than once I've had it write an image to a disk that had trouble and was completely useless.
 
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avadondragon

Well-known member
The incompatibility mentioned previously regarding variable speed floppy drives is only the case for 800K Macintosh floppies used with the first generation Macintosh SE and older machines. It is (as far as I know) impossible to write such a disk using a PC without a Kryoflux. Later Mac SEs and every model made thereafter use the exact same 1.44M floppy standard as PCs however. Given that you said you are working with a PB100 and PB180 this should be a non-issue for you.

It is in fact possible albeit somewhat challenging to write a Mac floppy image to a disk using a PC. I had to do that myself many many years ago when I first got started. I can't remember exactly HOW I managed it back then but I think I know how it can be done now. This isn't the best or recommended method of getting an OS onto old hardware though if you've got something like a BlueSCSI available to you.

To write a Mac floppy from an image on a PC using RaWrite you first have to strip the header from your image file using the DiskCopy2DSK for Windows tool available here. This will only work on DiskCopy 4.2 image files but that should be the format used for most everything from the repository or garden. Once the header is stripped off, the file will be a raw image format that you can write under Windows. Keep in mind I haven't personally tried to do this in ages so my info may not be perfect but that should work. You won't be able to verify your disk except by trying it out on the Mac though - hopefully your drives are good. HFVExplorer might be able to read it under Windows but since I haven't used that tool in ages I don't remember what it's capability are.

I'm not sure but it is possible that the MacOS image files available at WinWorld are already PC friendly raw format. Most of their images generally are.

Again this is definitely NOT the recommended method of getting an OS on your old Mac given better new alternatives.
 

Paralel

Well-known member
As far as where to get System 7, you can get it from the mirrors of Apple's own FTP:

This is 7.0 & 7.0.1 (although annoyingly as an SMI, so you would need to use an emulator or actual classic Mac to decompress and write the images):


This is 7.5.3, also provided by Apple's FTP:


If you look around that area of the FTP mirror, it has all the updates from 7.5.5 all the way to 9.2.1.

Mirrors of Apple's old FTP pretty much contain copies of just about anything you could want that was released by Apple, especially if you include the Dev mirror as well.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
You can do what you said - have a flick through the bluescsi manual. Set up four partitions - one with a quickstart image you mentioned, one with all the installers for the software you want (make sure you include Drive Setup), and a third as your install destination. The fourth is a spare / for your second OS version. Make them 2GB.

Once you install everything you want, there is an option to turn off automatic mounting in Drive Setup - you can just make the partitions you don't need go away (until you need them again).
 
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