writing a mac classic disk using amiga floppy drive

[gmiaow]

So I am in a situation; I found a Powerbook 150 (a mac from 1994) in a skip and, curious, brought it home.

I would love to get it running again. I imaged the hard disk from it and it seems there is plenty there, but when I boot it I get what I assume is a non-system-disk error, so I imagine I will need to reinitialize the drive and so on. Since I can get System 7.5 from apple's website, the first thing I need to do is get the thing to boot from a floppy, but this is full of all the usual catch-22s you get dealing with old machines.

Now I have an old PC laptop running linux with a floppy drive, but that drive seems to be faulty. I also have my trusty amiga 1200 to which I can get files no problem over a network, but I have no desktop macs (the closest I have is a netbook running osx).

The logical thing to do would be to get an image of a bootable disk onto the amiga and write it to a floppy. I know that if I was able to get a floppy drive to work in Linux I could simply dd the file to the drive. Is there any equivalent of dd that can write an image raw to a disk for the amiga, circa Workbench 3.1?

I know there is a program called transdisk, but it deals with ADFs, which I believe are somewhat different than say, IMG files. I have a feeling I'm going to have to do something bizarre like run a mac emulator in winUAE before I figure this out.

[prowler]

Hi gmiaow,

Your PowerBook 150 is a 68030 machine sold between July 1994 and October 1995. It will run Macintosh Systems in the range 7.1.1 - 7.6.1, so if you are planning to use System 7.5, this will be ideal.

The PowerBook is fitted with a Macintosh 1.44MB high density floppy drive, but your Amiga 1200 has a double density floppy drive which can read, write and format 720kB Macintosh-formatted disks under A-Max, Emplant or ShapeShifter Macintosh emulation, or from WorkBench or CLI with CrossMAC installed.

The PowerBook 150 will read, write and boot from 720kB Macintosh-formatted disks, but will not format them unless you are running System 7.1.1 or 7.1.2 and you have the 720K Floppy Formatter Extension installed.

To initialize the PowerBook's hard drive from a floppy disk you can generate in your Amiga, you will need to cram the System 7.5 Disk Tools onto a bootable 720kB floppy disk, and that might not be possible.

However, if the hard drive can be mounted when the machine is booted from a floppy disk, it may be possible to make the hard drive bootable without initializing it merely by copying over the System files from the floppy disk.

Originally Posted by gmiaow

I know there is a program called transdisk, but it deals with ADFs, which I believe are somewhat different than say, IMG files. I have a feeling I'm going to have to do something bizarre like run a mac emulator in winUAE before I figure this out.

Alternatively, if you have a Windows PC with at least one FAT partition, a 3½-inch floppy drive and a DOS boot disk, you can actually generate both 1.44MB and 720kB Macintosh-formatted floppy disks from IMG files which will boot the PowerBook without running either a Mac emulator or WinUAE...

...and the System 7.5 Disk Tools floppy you require is a bootable 1.44MB Macintosh-formatted disk.

Interested?

[gmiaow]

Thanks for a very useful reply prowler.

Alternateively, if you have a Windows PC with at least one FAT partition and a 3½-inch floppy drive and a DOS boot disk, you can actually generate both 1.44MB and 720kB Macintosh-formatted floppy disks from IMG files which will boot the PowerBook without running either a Mac emulator or WinUAE...

...and the System 7.5 Disk Tools floppy you require is a bootable 1.44MB Macintosh-formatted disk.

I think that's what I'll have to do. I have to dig up a floppy drive from somewhere and write it from a desktop machine. The great thing about the amiga is the way you can prepare drives for real steel amigas with the emulator, but I never used a mac back in the day, so I don't think it's quite as easy.

Thought maybe having the amiga would help, but the DD vs HD thing is the killer in this case. Just gotta find 21 HD floppies now

[gmiaow]

For the record, I did the above, using rawwrite in windows, and created a disk (actually about 10) from disktools1.img and disktools2.img, gave them to the powerbookm which when given said disks, informed me that it was a "happy mac" but nevertheless ejected the disk (a major WTF moment for me as I had never seen that before) and then went back to its "insert disk" icon...

Good old apple and their informative error messages. Guess this isn't an amiga problem anymore anyway! Thanks for the reply.

[prowler]

It shouldn't have ejected both floppy disks! One is for 68k machines and the other is for PowerPCs.

The 68k disk should have booted your machine. That it didn't probably indicates a floppy drive fault.