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Restoring a 6100/66 DOS Compatibility, need help with software

Juror22

Well-known member
I use a Mac to make my SD card clones, but yes, any process that makes a bit-for-bit copy will work.  I use a process for cloning raspberry PI, SD cards for Macs (I had to modify it a bit).  It does take a bit of time, so you will need to be patient.

 

Verault

Well-known member
The win32diskimager works great and its easy and straightforward. Its also a nice way to backup and restore the computer(s) now. There is a speed increase with the new SD card but not as much as I hoped. I'm a novice when it comes to loading extensions so i disabled a lot of the items that seem unnecessary... This is primarily going to be a games machine. It started complaining about printers and the spooler so I will need to re-enable a printer and the spooler to make the message go away. But I think were on the way to finishing up this project. Thank you to everyone who chimed in.

 

dan.dem

Well-known member
I still have found no program called "activity Light" or "activity LED"
There was "Norton Disk Light". I think it was a System Extension without interface, but not sure. It displayed a small disk icon in the menu bar near the Apple-symbol (hmm... probably with SCSI-ID?) that flicked as real HD indicators are flickering. It might have been a shareware that was bought out by Symantec. However it seems it have had a bad reputation (see this ArsTechnica post: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=686143) regarding stability issues.

So better leave it out.

 
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Solvalou

Well-known member
I've had no issues with Norton's DiskLight. They usually have a little control panel option so you can choose where it shows (too left or right corner) and if you want to show the ID and floppy activity.

Find it quite nice to have for machines that have no disk activity LED on the case (which is most).

 

dan.dem

Well-known member
The Ars-article mentions that "DiskLight was finally  'fixed' [however not so much if you read further] around version 4". I didn't have problems with it myself but used it only for a short time. My drives always had been reliable and in that era (fin de siècle) not yet so silent that you wouldn't hear disk activity.

So, DiskLight didn't provide useful information for me then. But I understand this is totally different with noiseless solid state drives.

Anecdote about avoiding additional system stuff: I mostly had lower end (and at least in the early 1990s) memory starved Macs and tried to save any processor cycle and kiloByte of RAM. I deactivated as much System Extensions and cdevs as possible, years before Extension Manager became part of System 7.5. Some went the opposite way. When I visited our local University's department of Informatics somebody started a Mac IIsi with System 7.0 showing two rows of extensions and cdevs. It used 4 MB of RAM only for the system itself. I was shocked, having just upgraded my Mac to 4 MB in total. I managed my system to take only 950k or so (without Apple Talk) but my work configuration was around 1.15 MB (System 7.0.1•).

 

LaPorta

Well-known member
I am not certain regarding the article there. If you notice, the first post mixes both FileSaver and DiskLight. In my experience, FileSaver was the worlds biggest pain, slowing the computer, making shut down take forever, and also causing file system issues as well on top of it. I think the posters got confused, intertwining the two. I am not sure how in the world a simple control panel that checks for disk access would corrupt your files. I can say for sure I had disk light running for years with no issues at all. However, I suppose this is all open to interpretation.

 

dan.dem

Well-known member
@LaPorta  you are right, they likely mixed up their problems.
FileSaver was indeed a pain, meant as cure for the disk corruption caused by the pathetically unstable Mac OS on early PPC.

Disk Doctor was the only Norton tool I used frequently. It saved my disks several times. Eventually the automated file system repair at start up introduced with System 8.0/8.1 (or was it 8.5?) made DiskDoctor mostly obsolete for me. Not only became Mac OS more stable it could repair the damage done by the crashes itself.

 
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LaPorta

Well-known member
I will say, UnErase saved me quite a few times. Once in college, I fell prey to that bug in OS X 10.1 (I think it was) that when installed on a partitioned drive with OS 9, data loss ensued. I accidentally reformatted and erased my entire paper I was writing. Taking a few hours, I managed to find and recover it with UnErase.

 
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