Mount A/UX floppy on modern OS?

[toshiba1]

Hi All,

I have a handful of old A/UX floppies from the late 80's. And I have a USB 3.5 floppy drive which works with Mac floppies in Basilisk.

I want to know if there is a way I can mount these AU/X floppies on a modern OS, linux perhaps?  Any info is appreciated.

Thank you!

 

[uyjulian]

If the floppies are formatted as FFS/UFS, you may be able to mount them under Linux.

If the floppies are formatted as HFS, you should be able to mount them under Linux also.

 

[toshiba1]

Thank you -- this was a Mac II (with 2MB ram) with A/UX installed on the hard drive in 1988 August, so it was likely an early version of A/UX; does this suggest the floppies were likely to be formatted UFS?

 

[uyjulian]

Possibly.

If you have a modern macOS system, you can image the floppy disk, then use "hdiutil imageinfo /path/to/disk.img" to check the filesystem.

 

[Gorgonops]

Thank you -- this was a Mac II (with 2MB ram)

Are they high or low density disks? Reading them on anything with a Mac is unlikely to work if it's the latter. (I ask because the original Mac II didn't include the 1.44mb Superdrive.)

It's not unusual for Unix floppy disk to not really have a file system per-se, they may simply have data written in something like tar or dump format written straight to the raw sectors. (IE, there's no disk directory, etc.)

 

[toshiba1]

Pretty sure they are low density. Yes this Mac II had the 800k drive. 

So I am out of luck? 

 

[Gorgonops]

For low density you'll need a beige era Mac. No USB floppy drive will read them. They could be perfectly normal hfs format.

 

[toshiba1]

I own another Mac II with two of the superdrive floppy drives which can read the larger 1.44mb floppy. Is there any way to read these older A/Ux floppies on this? 

Thank you very much 

 

[uyjulian]

To check if it is high density or low density, check if the hole on the bottom right (NOT the write-protect tab on the bottom left) is present. If the hole is present, it is a high density disk. If it is not present, it is a low density disk.

You can image the disks using Disk Copy on the Macintosh II. From there, copy to your macOS or Linux system and check the image using various utilities. You may need to convert the Disk Copy format to another format using "hdiutil" on macOS.

 

[toshiba1]

Thanks. I will attempt to make disk images when I get back home in a few days.