Partition Magic for SCSI emulated Macs?

[ironborn65]

Hi everyone,

this post will be very likely nonsense.

In the early 90s I was using partition magic daily: boot, hotkey, select OS, return, restart.
It could have been DOS (3,4,5), NT, OS/2 or Linux.

Would it be possible to do the same for SCSI-emulated-based Macs? Yes, the technology would be different.
Because I just noticed that SCSI emulators provide an API, so why not?
A tiny System 6 App could run straight from ID 1 image with the sole scope of selecting one of the disk image files, changing the ID in the ini file and restarting.

Or as an alternative, a http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/ could be developed just to select the disk image, without relying on System 6 and restart.

This can be just crazy or follies, please take it as chat after a couple+ of beers

PF

 

[LaPorta]

Call me a defeatist or contrarian, but since it probably takes all of ten seconds for one of these old Macs to start from System 6 and then use System Picker, where’s the urgency for it?

 

[ironborn65]

10 seconds + the app
time is precious , the sooner the better

still, it'd be handy, now I have to edit the ini in the SD card file using another computer or have a handful of SD cards to choose from, assuming I have easy access to the SD card

 

[LightBulbFun]

yall are overcomplicating things majorly for something apple already provides as a boot time service

Startup Key Combinations - the pickle's Low-End Mac FAQ

the pickle's Low-End Mac FAQ: useful startup key conbinations

macfaq.org

• cmd-opt-shift-delete-(#): Boot from a SCSI device on the SCSI bus other than the disk selected in the Startup Disk control panel. The optional number allows for booting from a specific SCSI ID.

 

[LaPorta]

Doesn't work on what would be a lot of the target Macs (Plus, SE, etc).

 

[Chopsticks]

sometimes I use a stripped down system 7.0.1 floppy image on my floppyemu with system picker on it, I renamed system picker to ‘finder’ and it boots up straight Into system picker pretty quickly. Would probably boot even quicker on a scsi image.
still would be great to have a ROM hotkey that shows a boot menu option to select a drive, maybe Something similar to holding option down on open-firmware machines…

 

[ironborn65]

System picker is fine. Still, I need to assemble a single image file with different folders, this makes the file bigger and less manageable. Also creating a brand new image from Apple System Install is trickier if I then have to copy contents in a "master" image. I like to have a set of ready-to-be-used image files with meaningful names visible in the file system of my modern Mac, drag and drop, forget about ini files, and just restart to 68k to choose the one I want.
Ideally, I'd like to select an image file rather than a folder.
At the moment I have a set of SD cards labelled with the OS version.

I have too many tech gaps to fill from my early days to think about developing something, so yes, forgive me if this ends just in a chit-chat

 

[Chopsticks]

you could also try using SwitchBoot

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/switchboot

its a Extension that allows you to select a boot drive early on during bootup.
it doesnt let you boot different partitions on the same SCSI drive but if you has a few different scsi drive images it'll at least allow you to easily select what to boot from.

 

[LaPorta]

Wow, I didn’t know that existed! What a great option!

 

[ironborn65]

you could also try using SwitchBoot

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/switchboot

its a Extension that allows you to select a boot drive early on during bootup.
it doesnt let you boot different partitions on the same SCSI drive but if you has a few different scsi drive images it'll at least allow you to easily select what to boot from.

amazing!
I'd need the extension installed in all the images I will use
I will give it a try
thanks

 

[Chopsticks]

In a perfect would we just need someone who can merge all the features of switchboot, system picker and System Switcher and create both a CDEV and standard APPL app and it would probably cover just about everyones use cases