Hi guys,

Is there anyway to add a physical hard drive to a mini vmac or other emulator? I need to install System 7.5.5 on my Performa, but it appears that the CD drive can no longer read discs. I would like to use my G4 and an emulator to install it on the hard drive. Thanks in advance.. :)

Ben

Hi,

You are addressing a problematic issue. Only perhaps you can add a physical disk to Basilisk on your G4. You would need to manually edit the .basilisk_ii_prefs file and know at which device your extra physical disk in OSX is connected. Every device in OSX is referred to by one of the files in the /dev folder (normally invisible). So you would add a entry like:
disk /dev/"devicename" in the .basilisk_ii_prefs file to address your disk.

I never tried.

Best,
Cat_7

"devicename" would be the name of the file in /dev/ that refers to the disk, which has no relation to the volume name you can see in the Finder. Also, /dev/ is not only invisible in the Finder, but also inaccessible in the Finder. The files in /dev/ can only be found with terminal command ls. Such a file could have a name like "disk2s2".

Another possibility may be to add a disk that is mounted in OSX to the volumes list in BasiliskII like this:
disk /Volumes/"volumename"
where "volumename" is the name of the volume you see in the Finder.

Another possible approach is to make an image of the hard drive, use an emulator to install System 7.5.5 in the disk image, and then write the disk image back to the hard drive. I've just tried this approach with a floppy disk (in OS X 10.6.8) and it worked. The steps are:

Run Disk Utility and select the desired partition in the hard drive. (Not the hard drive itself).

Click the "Info" button and look for the Disk Identifier line. (My floppy disk is "disk5".) Close the info window.

Click the "Unmount button.

Launch /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.

Type (replacing disk5 with the Disk Identifier found above):
dd if=/dev/disk5 of=~/my_image.dsk
and press return

This should create my_image.dsk in your home folder. Mount this in an emulator such as Mini vMac or Basilisk II and make the desired changes, such as installing System 7.5.5.

Go back to the Terminal Application and type
dd if=~/my_image.dsk of=/dev/disk5
and press return

This write the image back over the original. This is obviously a very dangerous command, such
as if you type the wrong destination. Make sure that the destination exactly matches the source used in the first dd command. (And after the first dd command make sure my_image.dsk has the original contents of desired disk drive, and not some other drive.)

For a floppy disk this worked without complaint in a non administrative account. For a hard drive there might be more protections, and it might be necessary to use "sudo dd ..." from an administrative account.