Creating a Mac OS rescue zip disk

[jamie marchant]

Hi:

 I tried to make a rescue zip disk but for some reason I can't select it form 'start-up disk'.(it's grayed out'). I have a 'System Folder' with a proper icon, it has a suitcase, Finder and Mac OS Rom. What am I doing wrong?

-Jamie

 

[onlyonemac]

Did you put the zip disk drivers on the zip disk or are you loading them from your current startup volume? If the latter then you need to put the drivers on the actual zip disk otherwise it will not be possible to boot from that zip disk.

 

[Elfen]

Check the usual suspects: Termination, Where is it on the SCSI Chain, What SCSI ID it has, Formatting, System Install instead of dropping in the System Folder to copy it, Blessed System Folder, and so on.

Not all ZIP Disks will boot a system, and not all systems will accept a Zip Disk Drive as a boot drive. A Jazz Drive works a lot better in this regard. The Zip Drive Drivers is not that necessary as they are one of the later set of driver extensions to load on most systems.

The problems here are you not mentioning what kind of Mac System you are using the Zip Drive on, and what System/OS the Zip Disk contains. In the very least, the Zip Drive should be the first device on the external SCSI Chain, with Termination on and a low SCSI ID number (the Internal Hard Drive is usually 0, so the Zip Drive should be 1.) If possible, you may need to use Drive Set Up to format the Zip Disk if its allowable, not all Drive Set Up programs support Zip Drives. Just using "Erase Disk" or "Format Disk" from the Desktop Menu will not add Boot Sectors to your Zip disk. I believe that the Iomega Utilities from the Zip Drive Floppy Tools Disk can format a Zip Disk and give it Boot Sectors, use it if you have it.

 

[Bunsen]

Another known trick is to power up the Zip drive, with the Mac off, then start the Mac.

 

[onlyonemac]

The Zip Drive Drivers is not that necessary as they are one of the later set of driver extensions to load on most systems.

I was referring to the drivers in a hidden partition on the disk like how the Mac stores hard disk drivers. These are needed so that the drive can be accessed by the Mac before the operating system has loaded. The correct way to write these to the disk is to use a formatting utillity such as Drive7 (or I seem to think that a patched version of Apple HD SC Setup will do that but I'm not too sure if that's correct or not).

 

[CC_333]

Yes, as has been said by me before, formatting a Zip disk with the patched Apple HD SC Setup tool will install standard Apple drivers to the disk, making the machine think it is a regular disk with all the associated attributes thereof, which is really handy because you no longer need any special software to use said Zip disk, and as a side effect of this, it won't be ejected at shut down or restart, enabling one to use it as an internal hard drive replacement.

c

 

[jamie marchant]

I forgot to subscribe to this topic drat, I will try the apple utilities and see if that works.

 

[jamie marchant]

Well I got it too boot even though it's 'grayed out' in start-up disks. I guess the Mac OS doesn't see it as valid even though the Mac's ROM does.

 

[Elfen]

I was referring to the drivers in a hidden partition on the disk like how the Mac stores hard disk drivers. These are needed so that the drive can be accessed by the Mac before the operating system has loaded. The correct way to write these to the disk is to use a formatting utillity such as Drive7 (or I seem to think that a patched version of Apple HD SC Setup will do that but I'm not too sure if that's correct or not).

I've used SilverLining with success on zip Drives. But now I use a Jazz Drive and they seem to do this on their own without any drivers.