Making Disks for the Lisa 400K Drive

[Zhinü]

What’s the best way to make Lisa disks? I had a hell of a time trying to make some working disks.

I thought the Apple Legacy CD images would work but they didn’t (threw unformatted disk error on the Lisa), I tried images from online but StuffIt kept throwing an error when they were unpacked, only for the images that were unpacked to be probably corrupted (same issue as earlier), and when I did get one working disk (LisaWrite) I accidentally formatted it in a later test.

My current setup is a LC580, Mac OS 8.6, the images downloaded in StuffIt form from MacMothership from PC, transferred over via PCExchange floppies, then unpacked using StuffIt 5.0, and then written via Diskcopy 4.2 (I believe).

 

[lisa2]

It's important you use Diskcopy 4.2 and not version 6.x.x. Diskcopy 4.2 preserves the Lisa tag bytes, later versions don't.

One other way to make Lisa disks is to use the Lisa herself using BLU. Lisa BLU
You can load BLU on bare metal over the serial port, then make a BLU diskette. From there you can use BLU to create Lisa disks from image files.

 

[thecloud]

You can also use DART™ 1.5.x to create the images. It preserves the tag bytes.

 

[Zhinü]

Alright, thanks! Turns out the disk images I found for Lisa OS 3.1 are faulty, and several other archives either don't work on either diskcopy 4.2, DART, or if they do make images, the images don't boot on the Lisa (floppy drive confirmed working with BLU). Does anyone know a good archive that has LOS 3.1 or 3.0?

 

[Zhinü]

And now my 400K drive in my Lisa stopped working. When it attempts to format disks in BLU, it throws error 1B after a second or two. This happens regardless of disk.