MagicSD for SCSI2SD owners

[esselfortium]

I use hfstools via Terminal to deal with HFS partitions on my modern Mac without needing to use dd. It's not ideal, but it works.

 

[tekkned]

I have made a version with both 7.5.5 and a hacked version of OS 8 that runs on 68030 (must be 32-bit clean) if anyone's interested

I'm interested. I've upgraded my SE/30 with an 040 card. Have a SCSI2CF here and want to try out OS7.5.5 and OS8. Let me know. Thanks

 

[Nixontheknight]

I'm interested. I've upgraded my SE/30 with an 040 card. Have a SCSI2CF here and want to try out OS7.5.5 and OS8. Let me know. Thanks

here's the one with OS 8 and 7.5.5. You'll have to load any special extensions or control panels needed yourself

 

[tekkned]

Thank you very much. I've got something in place. It already thinks it's an IIcx using WishIWere. And the control panel for the Carerra040 card. Or are you referring to something else perhaps?

 

[Nixontheknight]

Thank you very much. I've got something in place. It already thinks it's an IIcx using WishIWere. And the control panel for the Carerra040 card. Or are you referring to something else perhaps?

that's what I meant, I think I already have wish I were on the Magic SD (on the OS 8 partition), you will have to put in the Carrera040 control panel

 

[tekkned]

that's what I meant, I think I already have wish I were on the Magic SD (on the OS 8 partition), you will have to put in the Carrera040 control panel

Will do, thanks. And just use Balena Etcher on a windows machine to get the ISO (and partitions) on a CF card? Or do I have to use other software for that?

 

[Nixontheknight]

Will do, thanks. And just use Balena Etcher on a windows machine to get the ISO (and partitions) on a CF card? Or do I have to use other software for that?

just use whatever image writing software you have on hand to write it to the SD card, it should work

 

[tekkned]

I'm trying to find an option to give your answer a thumbs up. Trying to limit the answers a bit to keep the thread compact Then again: Thanks for the help

 

[Will Cheyney]

This looks brilliant! Can it also be used with a FloppyEMU running in HD20 mode?

 

[Realitystorm]

Interesting. I had been planning to do something similar for SCSI2SD to make it easier to update. I have a SCSI2SD, a MacSD and a FloppyEMU, I like the convenience of the volume/partition files for the MacSD and FloppyEMU, and like you, I wanted to have a way to move files over more easily to the SCSI2SD. Currently I use DD and have a batch file that I run that automatically splits out the partitions, and then a second batch that merges it all back together.

I had planned to look at doing what you did and add a new version of my images at https://www.savagetaylor.com/downloads/downloads-macintosh/

I was debating what host format to use, e.g. fat32 or exFat. I was leaning towards fat32, with:

1. host fat32 file system
2. 48k HFS header file
3. ~2GB HFS partition/volume file

This would mean that I could make a standard ~2GB image that could be burned to any size SD card (2GB or greater), with the remaining space being outside the FAT32 partition. That remaining unformatted space could be setup as one or more additional drives in the SCSI2SD configurations.

At least that's what I was thinking, I'm glad to see someone has already done something similar

 

[Andrew]

Interesting. I had been planning to do something similar for SCSI2SD to make it easier to update. I have a SCSI2SD, a MacSD and a FloppyEMU, I like the convenience of the volume/partition files for the MacSD and FloppyEMU, and like you, I wanted to have a way to move files over more easily to the SCSI2SD. Currently I use DD and have a batch file that I run that automatically splits out the partitions, and then a second batch that merges it all back together.

I had planned to look at doing what you did and add a new version of my images at https://www.savagetaylor.com/downloads/downloads-macintosh/

I was debating what host format to use, e.g. fat32 or exFat. I was leaning towards fat32, with:

1. host fat32 file system
2. 48k HFS header file
3. ~2GB HFS partition/volume file

This would mean that I could make a standard ~2GB image that could be burned to any size SD card (2GB or greater), with the remaining space being outside the FAT32 partition. That remaining unformatted space could be setup as one or more additional drives in the SCSI2SD configurations.

At least that's what I was thinking, I'm glad to see someone has already done something similar

Are you the author of that blog? Nice work, I have read every single article and find it very informative.

Regarding magicsd, it would be nice if it could be standardised somehow. Then it would make it easier for people to exchange images (same way as MacSD).

 

[Realitystorm]

Are you the author of that blog?

Yep, haven't done many updates lately, been busy with work, but hope to have some time over the next couple of months. For standardization, as long as people always mount the partition files in emulators to update their contents things should go smoothly. My concern for this is the same as FloppyEMU and MacSD, the user needs to understand that the partition file has to be continuous, if it get's broken up on write this approach will break. E.g. if they try to "copy" over a partition file that isn't the same size.

 

[timob0]

Hi,
just to quickly introduce myself as this is my first post on this forum: I'm from Germany and got into retrocomputing a while back with 90s Unix boxes (SGI, Sun) and have moved to the first portable computers of that time (IBM PS/2 P75). I've aquired and restored a Macintosh Portable 5120 just recently which required cleaning, recapping and replacing the SCSI disk.
I use a SCSI2SD v5.1 in the portable by means of a self made adapter cable and I used the "dd" approach to write disk images to known adresses on the SD card. So far, that approach has worked without issues, however the idea brought up on this thread of using a FAT filesystem as a container is so much better since the images are accessible directly by emulators that way.

I think I found a way to simplify the magicsd procedure which works like this:
1) Format the SD card with vFAT/FAT32 filesystem
2) Copy over the disk images - I currently have 2 x 2GB images on a 16GB card
3) Find the addresses and sizes of the images on the sd-card and convert to 512byte block units
4) Generate a configuration file for use with the scsi2sd utility to configure the hardware

Steps 3) and 4) are covered with the attached "create.sh" shell script on a Linux machine that uses the "fatcat" utility to find the location of the files on disk and "parted" to find the FAT32 partition offset from the start of disk. Once that's known, an XML config file is generated and written to the SD card for subsequent reconfiguration of the SCSI2SD adapter.

This is a work in progress but still want to share it here in case anybody finds it useful. I know it has some limitations such as running on Linux only at the moment due to dependency on that fatcat utility. Also the caveat is that the files must be contigously stored on the SD card which they usually are when freshly copied. So for replacing/changing images it might be a good idea to move them off the SD card, reformat and move back to avoid fragementation.

How to use the script:
- Run "sudo apt install fatcat" to install the utility
- Unzip "script.zip" on your linux box, should give you "create.sh" and "boardconfig.xml"
- Format a SDCard, e.g. sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/xyz or do with the UI
- Copy your diskimages to the SD card (dsk and img file extensions are viewed as harddisk image, iso would be viewed as a CDROM)
- Tweak the boardconfig.xml file to suit your needs - the one attached works for my SCSI2SD v5.1
- Run create.sh with the SD Card mountpoint, e.g. "./create.sh /media/user/sdcard"

Once complete, you should find a scsi2sd_config.xml file on the card which you can feed into the scsi2sd utility to configure the board. After that, move the SD Card from the linux box to the SCSI2SD drive in the target machine and boot it up - on my Portable that worked straight away.

Cheers!

 

[Nixontheknight]

Hi,
just to quickly introduce myself as this is my first post on this forum: I'm from Germany and got into retrocomputing a while back with 90s Unix boxes (SGI, Sun) and have moved to the first portable computers of that time (IBM PS/2 P75). I've aquired and restored a Macintosh Portable 5120 just recently which required cleaning, recapping and replacing the SCSI disk.
I use a SCSI2SD v5.1 in the portable by means of a self made adapter cable and I used the "dd" approach to write disk images to known adresses on the SD card. So far, that approach has worked without issues, however the idea brought up on this thread of using a FAT filesystem as a container is so much better since the images are accessible directly by emulators that way.

I think I found a way to simplify the magicsd procedure which works like this:
1) Format the SD card with vFAT/FAT32 filesystem
2) Copy over the disk images - I currently have 2 x 2GB images on a 16GB card
3) Find the addresses and sizes of the images on the sd-card and convert to 512byte block units
4) Generate a configuration file for use with the scsi2sd utility to configure the hardware

Steps 3) and 4) are covered with the attached "create.sh" shell script on a Linux machine that uses the "fatcat" utility to find the location of the files on disk and "parted" to find the FAT32 partition offset from the start of disk. Once that's known, an XML config file is generated and written to the SD card for subsequent reconfiguration of the SCSI2SD adapter.

This is a work in progress but still want to share it here in case anybody finds it useful. I know it has some limitations such as running on Linux only at the moment due to dependency on that fatcat utility. Also the caveat is that the files must be contigously stored on the SD card which they usually are when freshly copied. So for replacing/changing images it might be a good idea to move them off the SD card, reformat and move back to avoid fragementation.

How to use the script:
- Run "sudo apt install fatcat" to install the utility
- Unzip "script.zip" on your linux box, should give you "create.sh" and "boardconfig.xml"
- Format a SDCard, e.g. sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/xyz or do with the UI
- Copy your diskimages to the SD card (dsk and img file extensions are viewed as harddisk image, iso would be viewed as a CDROM)
- Tweak the boardconfig.xml file to suit your needs - the one attached works for my SCSI2SD v5.1
- Run create.sh with the SD Card mountpoint, e.g. "./create.sh /media/user/sdcard"

Once complete, you should find a scsi2sd_config.xml file on the card which you can feed into the scsi2sd utility to configure the board. After that, move the SD Card from the linux box to the SCSI2SD drive in the target machine and boot it up - on my Portable that worked straight away.

Cheers!

can someone make a Windows version of this tool?

 

[btse]

Could it work with cygwin?

 

[Andrew]

Hi,
just to quickly introduce myself as this is my first post on this forum: I'm from Germany and got into retrocomputing a while back with 90s Unix boxes (SGI, Sun) and have moved to the first portable computers of that time (IBM PS/2 P75). I've aquired and restored a Macintosh Portable 5120 just recently which required cleaning, recapping and replacing the SCSI disk.
I use a SCSI2SD v5.1 in the portable by means of a self made adapter cable and I used the "dd" approach to write disk images to known adresses on the SD card. So far, that approach has worked without issues, however the idea brought up on this thread of using a FAT filesystem as a container is so much better since the images are accessible directly by emulators that way.

This is awesome. I will try and see how it works.

Thanks

 

[Armitage]

I think I found a way to simplify the magicsd procedure which works like this:
1) Format the SD card with vFAT/FAT32 filesystem
2) Copy over the disk images - I currently have 2 x 2GB images on a 16GB card
3) Find the addresses and sizes of the images on the sd-card and convert to 512byte block units
4) Generate a configuration file for use with the scsi2sd utility to configure the hardware

I tried out your script this morning and it worked perfectly on the first try. Thanks so much for sharing!

 

[Skate323k137]

Accidentally replied to a 1st page post.

Awesome to see someone script this out, I wrote up a whole post about how this is a pain but can be done before seeing the 2nd page of the thread lol

 

[timob0]

Thanks for trying out and sharing your thoughts
I uploaded a version that supports both Linux and MacOSX to github - feel free to grab from there: https://github.com/timob0/scsi2sd-mkcfg

Cheers
Timo

 

[Realitystorm]

I'm finally working on new images for my site based on this, I'll be adding to my downloads and will add a new guide for SCSI2SD specific images, I'll be providing two 8GB versions: FAT32 and exFAT. Both will have:

1. 7.21 real GB of space (calculated properly using 1024 vs. 1000)
2. the 48kb partition file
3. three 2GB partition files named P1.img, P2.img, P3.img
4. one 1GB partition file named P4.img.
5. an .xml file for SCSI2SD version 4/5 (may work on 6)

The first 2GB partition will have the contents of my "bootable" image on it.
You'll be able to write either the FAT32 or exFAT to your SD card using balenaEtcher or DD etc.
You'll be able to directly edit the contents of the P#.img files using Basilisk II or mini-vMac etc.

IF you write the file to an SD card larger than 8GB, you'll be able to use anything remaining space past the first 7.21 GB on your SD card for your 2nd, 3rd or 4th SCSI drive on your SCSI2SD, BUT, you will NOT be able to directly edit those additional "drives".