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Archiving Lisa Floppies
- Thread starter LaPorta
- Start date
Thanks both of you. I used Disk Copy on my SE to make images. They won't mount of course, but I assume the information is still contained within.
Here is another question sort of related: is there any disk utility that will work on MFS disks? Disk First Aid under System 6 doesn't seem to want to.
Here is another question sort of related: is there any disk utility that will work on MFS disks? Disk First Aid under System 6 doesn't seem to want to.
So your goal is to make disk images of these floppies as quickly as possible, and hope that they haven't degraded.
Might I ask what these disks are, if they're labeled? There are few Lisa softwares that haven't already been imaged, but you never know. Do you know what OS they are for? The Lisa supported many operating systems (LOS, MacWorks, Xenix, UniPlus, Monitor). There were a few things that were kind of their own OS, but generally they were based on Monitor.
If you have an actual working Lisa whose floppy drive a Serial Port B work, you can use BLU to transfer disk images to another computer running a terminal program such as ZTerm or Minicom/quodem/etc.: http://sigmasevensystems.com/BLU.html
Formatting wise, always use Disk Copy 4.2 for this unless there are bad sectors. You should be able to find it on macintoshgarden or other sites. Avoid newer versions of Disk Copy such as 6.x as they strip off the tags.
If you have a Lisa with MacWorks on it, Disk Copy 4.2 should also work there. Otherwise you'll want a classic Mac, you can use anything that has a floppy drive, even if it has System 9, but not g3, g4, g5, intel macs. You most likely will not be able to use a USB floppy drive as they are really PC drives and only support MFM, and not GCR. Preferably you'll want to use a Mac that has an ethernet adapter so you can copy the disk images off it easily.
I'd avoid compressing the Disk Copy images with StuffIt as it's more difficult to extract these on non classic macs, though possible. If you must, use zip.
Personally I use an old PPC laptop running System 9, while I do have a PCMCIA ethernet card, I prefer to copy the disk images to a CF card that sits inside a PCMCIA CF card adapter, and then I move this to a linux machine that has an external USB CF card reader. I've also used a IIsi with an ethernet adapter and then used scp to copy it across to my linux machine, but I find the 5300c easier to deal with.
Also avoid DART, although DART can work, the LZH compression it uses is problematic and you'd have to use a special version of The UnArchiver (there's a fork in my github repo for the special version of this) to convert them back to DC42. You want DiskCopy 4.2 format because almost all emulators support this specific format, including LisaEm, miniVMac, and the Big Mess'O'Wires FloppyEmu device.
It's highly unlikely that there is physical copy protection on Lisa disks, it's more likely that if you encounter errors when copying that the disks have gone bad, but there's always the possibility that some company did something weird. Generally Lisa disks are serialized to the VSROM serial number (a part of the CPU board) of the first Lisa they were installed on, when they're first installed. These are reversible easily. There's a tool for this that's part of LisaEm, and LisaEm itself will do this.
You can also use CopyIIMac, but be sure to save the images as DiskCopy 4.2 format: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/copy-ii-mac
You can also try: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/diskdup
While I appreciate the LisaEm plug, lisafsh-tool can be used to look at the file system and possibly extract files on the disks, but it's not going to help make the disks usable. Think of this more as an exfiltration tool so you can examine the files elsewhere.
Let me know if you need help with this.
Might I ask what these disks are, if they're labeled? There are few Lisa softwares that haven't already been imaged, but you never know. Do you know what OS they are for? The Lisa supported many operating systems (LOS, MacWorks, Xenix, UniPlus, Monitor). There were a few things that were kind of their own OS, but generally they were based on Monitor.
If you have an actual working Lisa whose floppy drive a Serial Port B work, you can use BLU to transfer disk images to another computer running a terminal program such as ZTerm or Minicom/quodem/etc.: http://sigmasevensystems.com/BLU.html
Formatting wise, always use Disk Copy 4.2 for this unless there are bad sectors. You should be able to find it on macintoshgarden or other sites. Avoid newer versions of Disk Copy such as 6.x as they strip off the tags.
If you have a Lisa with MacWorks on it, Disk Copy 4.2 should also work there. Otherwise you'll want a classic Mac, you can use anything that has a floppy drive, even if it has System 9, but not g3, g4, g5, intel macs. You most likely will not be able to use a USB floppy drive as they are really PC drives and only support MFM, and not GCR. Preferably you'll want to use a Mac that has an ethernet adapter so you can copy the disk images off it easily.
I'd avoid compressing the Disk Copy images with StuffIt as it's more difficult to extract these on non classic macs, though possible. If you must, use zip.
Personally I use an old PPC laptop running System 9, while I do have a PCMCIA ethernet card, I prefer to copy the disk images to a CF card that sits inside a PCMCIA CF card adapter, and then I move this to a linux machine that has an external USB CF card reader. I've also used a IIsi with an ethernet adapter and then used scp to copy it across to my linux machine, but I find the 5300c easier to deal with.
Also avoid DART, although DART can work, the LZH compression it uses is problematic and you'd have to use a special version of The UnArchiver (there's a fork in my github repo for the special version of this) to convert them back to DC42. You want DiskCopy 4.2 format because almost all emulators support this specific format, including LisaEm, miniVMac, and the Big Mess'O'Wires FloppyEmu device.
It's highly unlikely that there is physical copy protection on Lisa disks, it's more likely that if you encounter errors when copying that the disks have gone bad, but there's always the possibility that some company did something weird. Generally Lisa disks are serialized to the VSROM serial number (a part of the CPU board) of the first Lisa they were installed on, when they're first installed. These are reversible easily. There's a tool for this that's part of LisaEm, and LisaEm itself will do this.
You can also use CopyIIMac, but be sure to save the images as DiskCopy 4.2 format: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/copy-ii-mac
You can also try: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/diskdup
While I appreciate the LisaEm plug, lisafsh-tool can be used to look at the file system and possibly extract files on the disks, but it's not going to help make the disks usable. Think of this more as an exfiltration tool so you can examine the files elsewhere.
Let me know if you need help with this.
