Anyone using Basilisk II with a real hard drive?

[Galane]

I've done it in the past with a SCSI hard drive and did it once with an IDE drive.

I used the IDE drive in 98SE until a VIA driver update somehow zapped it.

How I did this...

In 98SE, it required chipset/IDE drivers that caused the hard drives to appear by name in Device Manager instead of as "generic". The Adaptec ASPI layer also had to be installed.

Boot to DOS mode or with a 98SE startup floppy and FDISK the drive as a single FAT16 partition. DO NOT FORMAT IT! If you format it, Windows will grab hold of it and it'll be inaccessible to the emulator.

In the GUI, select the drive under the SCSI tab then start Basilisk II.

Use a hacked Apple formatter to initialize the drive. You can only use a single partition. I tried several times to get two but it'd always crash. (Never tried FDISKing with two partitions.)

Now you can install Mac OS to that drive and boot from it.

No non-Apple drive formatter will work. Apparently they all do some sort of direct hardware access or bypassing of normal system commands. Whatever they do, Basilisk II doesn't respond as expected and the utility will crash.

ISTR attempting it with a 'clean' drive that wasn't FDISKed and having it not work. I didn't try it with a FAT32 drive as a non-boot drive for Mac OS 8.1.

I haven't tried this on Windows ME, NT4, 2000 or XP so I don't know if those OSes will allow such tricks with FDISKed but un-formatted drives.

[Ambassador]

Interesting. This would definitely provide a step toward A/UX emulation (which needs a real hard disk, and doesn't work with an "disk file").