Power PC hard drive connected to Mbp via USB

[ENRGuser]

Hey guys, I'm a complete novice at this sort of thing. I have an old Power PC clone IDE hard disk drive, mounted via a 3.5" HD enclosure & USB connection to my Mbp. I'm running mavericks and hoping I can run my old University Mac environment and all my original software (Mac OS 7.5) using SheepShaver.
I don't have the original install disk in my current location (Geographically) and wondering how i could possibly image the disk to be able to enable SheepShaver.
Drawing a complete blank currently.
Am I over ambitious? Is it possible?

[Ronald P. Regensburg]

You can use Disk Utility to create a disk image of that disk. Make sure you choose read/write for the format.

Whether you can use an image of that particular disk depends on several properties of the disk:

- How large is the disk? If it is very large, it may not work.
- Which MacOS version is installed on the disk. SheepShaver is only compatible with version 7.5.3 through 8.1 (with old world rom) and 8.5 through 9.0.4 (with new world rom). MacOS 9.1 and later will not work.
- Even when the OS version is compatible with SheepShaver, it may not work in SheepShaver, or may work with limitations, because the installation is for a different PPC machine than the one SheepShaver emulates. Only a direct installation of a compatible OS in SheepShaver will always provide a working startup disk with fully functional system.

Of course, if SheepShaver cannot use the installed OS, you can always mount your image as second disk next to another startup disk with compatible OS. You can then use files and applications from that disk. (For some applications re-installation or copying extensions to the boot system may be needed.)

[adespoton]

What I've done with my older systems is create a clean install from the same system version on SheepShaver, then mount the imaged drive and copy all the contents of the system folder over from the "clean" sheepshaver image to the image from the old hardware. This ensures that the correct system enablers are installed, etc.

After that, you'll probably have a few extensions (A/Rose, etc.) that you need to disable in order to get the modified image to boot.

I have a Mini vMac, BII, SS or PearPC image of every installation base I've had for every Mac since 1984, and it's great

The way I did it was that every time I went to upgrade to a new Mac, I'd make an image of the old one (first Mac eventually had a HD20) and copy that over to the new computer. Then I was able to copy the documents I wanted off the image, but had a snapshot of my life at that time When emulators came along, I found it was a cinch to revive all those old images for nostalgic purposes.

[Ronald P. Regensburg]

A System Enabler file is machine model related and is better not copied between different installations.

Indeed, "A/ROSE" is incompatible with SheepShaver and should be removed if present in the Extensions folder. The same is true for "Apple Audio Extension".