E-Maculation

So, I have an old Mac Performa 6200CD that runs OS8.1. I want to get rid of said Mac since it's just been taking up space for the past 10yrs. First, I was thinking that I would just salvage the hard drive, put it in an external drive enclosure and use it on my Windows XP machine. Then I found your site and thought, hey, why not get a Mac emulator up and working on the Windows XP machine.

My question is then how do I maintain all those programs and files installed on the original Mac HD to use with the Mac emulator in Windows? Is that even possible?

The Performa 6200CD should be a drop-in environment for running under SheepShaver. You could also run the software under QEMU using Mac OS 9.2.2 or 10.4.11 with Classic installed.

QEMU supports directly reading the disk.

However, what I've traditionally done is image my old disks and run the disk images in the emulators. This also protects against drive failures, allows access to faster drive I/O, and allows you to restore to backups more easily.

BasiliskII Build 142 may be an option for you, as it runs fine on a XP host.
Of course BasiliskII is a Motorola 680X0 emulator, so PPC apps or OS will not work.
Most apps of that time were compiled fat-binary, so you won´t miss much.

I never tried connecting a Mac IDE drive to BasiliskII Build 142, but I know that this works with Mac SCSI drives.
An external enclosure for a IDE drive looks like a long shot - are you thinking of a IDE to USB housing?
BasiliskII is not aware of USB ports and XP is not aware of HFS Mac HDDs.
If you have an empty pATA connector inside your XP box, I would try that.
I´m unsure whether XP will assign a drive letter to your (alien) Mac HDD that you could assign to the emulated MacOS via the BasiliskII GUI.
Creating backup disk images with DiskCopy on the Performa sure is the way to go if you can figure out where to store those backup.img files.

In case you might be looking for a bootable disk image for BasiliskII, please look here:
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macos-753-emulators

I was thinking of an IDE to USB enclosure.

This would allow you to image the drive, which would make the image available to BII / SheepShaver / QEMU, but BII and SheepShaver would be unable to see the drive itself. To be able to use the drive natively, it has to be SCSI or mounted internally.

Things will go much easier if you have access to something running OS X; using that, you can use Disk Utility to fully image it.

Unfortunately, I abandoned Macs before OS X.

Would using HFSExplorer to mount the Mac HD and copy the contents work?

It might; I can't remember whether HFVExplorer will mount an actual HD -- but it's worth a try if you've got all the equipment handy. From there you should be able to transfer everything to a disk image at least.

I finally recovered from the flu to get back to this.

Attaching the Mac HD via an USB external enclosure didn't work. The Windows XP Device Manager recognized the drive, but the Disk Management did not so it was not discoverable in HFSExplorer.

I disconnected one of my dvd drives and plugged the Mac HD in that way; it was recognized by the device manager as a drive and by the Disk Management as a un-initialized drive. HFSExplorer was able to discover the drive and all it's partitions. So I made a disk image of each of the partitions.


Now how do I get all these images to work with SheepShaver?

Just stick the path to all those images in SheepShaver's preferences files, one per line, in the same way the current disk is listed. They'll all show up when you boot

Boot will happen from the first listed bootable image.