.DSK-Compatibility vMac and Basilisk, HFVExplorer, SCSI2SD

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PowerMac84
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.DSK-Compatibility vMac and Basilisk, HFVExplorer, SCSI2SD

Post by PowerMac84 »

Hi there,

I‘ve using vMac and Basilisk plus HFVExplorer under Mac OS and Windows.
It seems that disk images in the .dsk-format are not really compatible. I‘ve had success using pre-made .DSK images from http://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/05/28/ ... isk-image/ with the DD command to a SD card via SCSI2SD. But I have not been able to use .DSK-images from vMac with SCSI2SD. Also vMac is not able to read those images from Savagetaylor.
With HFVExplorer I have been able to open the images from vMac but not from Savagetaylor.

All this seems like a one-way street. My goal is it to transfer applications to the .DSK image and then transfer this to SD card and use it in my Macintosh Classic.

Can someone point me into the right direction?

Patrick
uyjulian
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Re: .DSK-Compatibility vMac and Basilisk, HFVExplorer, SCSI2

Post by uyjulian »

You need to install SCSI drivers (for example from patched Apple SD HC Setup or LaCie Silverlining) in order for the disk to be usable.

You can open the disk via fusehfs to transfer applications if installing the drivers is too complicated for you.
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24bit
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Re: .DSK-Compatibility vMac and Basilisk, HFVExplorer, SCSI2

Post by 24bit »

I know that MiniVMac does write to .dsk images of RAW type.
I used that procedure some time ago to write physical floppies from Terminal with dd in OSX.
Maybe RAW is the key here too - dd does not like any headers for sure.

Maybe this is still of use for you:
https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewt ... raw#p46786
uyjulian
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Re: .DSK-Compatibility vMac and Basilisk, HFVExplorer, SCSI2

Post by uyjulian »

24bit wrote:I know that MiniVMac does write to .dsk images of RAW type.
I used that procedure some time ago to write physical floppies from Terminal with dd in OSX.
Maybe RAW is the key here too - dd does not like any headers for sure.

Maybe this is still of use for you:
https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewt ... raw#p46786
The format for booting floppies are different from the format of booting SCSI-based hard disks.

SCSI-based hard disks require a driver to be installed.
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adespoton
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Re: .DSK-Compatibility vMac and Basilisk, HFVExplorer, SCSI2

Post by adespoton »

It's probably worth noting that vMac Dsk images are standard Sony 800k FDDD images with the DiskCopy header removed. This makes an image that can be written to a disk, but doesn't have the checksum data in the header. That means you can't verify if the image is corrupted, and also means it may not write correctly to disk using some tools. If you create a new image using DiskCopy inside an emulator (easier to do in BII than Mini vMac), you will re-generate the headers, and the image will be universally writeable. Of course, this is all assuming you're writing 800k images. Mini vMac cheats by using the same format with an arbitrary file size, so you can have a 2GB floppy disk. This obviously isn't going to work on actual hardware, but the HFS partition should be able to be written to hard disk without difficulty -- something will just have to adjust the hardware-level configuration that underlies the partition.

So essentially, make sure you're creating 800Kb (or possibly 1.44MB for a Classic) disk images. SCSI2SD should be able to pick those up just fine. Otherwise, you should create a SCSI-style image in Basilisk II, and copy the data to that. This should work on SCSI2SD as well.

The problem here is that .dsk is just a file extension, and different emulators use it to mean different things. For Mini vMac, it's essentially a raw HFS partition. For Apple ][ emulators, it's a ProDOS volume containing a ProDOS partition. For SCSI2SD, it's a HD volume containing a SCSI driver partition and an HFS partition.

Best bet is to create the image and format it on the Classic using HD SC Setup, then take that created image, mount it in Mini vMac, and copy files to it.
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