Drive Setup in Mac OS 9.0.4

About SheepShaver, a PPC Mac emulator for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux that can run System 7.5.3 to MacOS 9.0.4.

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copland_kid
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Drive Setup in Mac OS 9.0.4

Post by copland_kid »

Hi all,

First of all, thanks to all the folks who've put a ton of effort into making SheepShaver viable. I'm running it on macOS Big Sur 11.0.1 emulating a PowerPC running Mac OS 9.0.4 without any serious issues.

However, the one issue I am having, and I can't find anything in the forum directly related, is with running Drive Setup, the old Mac OS hard drive management utility. I can launch the Drive Setup application, but no hard drives/volumes are listed. I have multiple drives attached to my SS instance that I can boot into without issue. Any thoughts on whether there are any work arounds to getting Drive Setup to function?

I realize that Drive Setup uses a lot of low-level Mac OS Toolbox and ROM code (and likely somethings that are hardware dependent), but other applications that enumerate volumes seem to work (like the Startup Disk control panel). If anyone has solved this and I missed it in the forums, apologies and would appreciate a pointer. Or, if anyone has ideas about root causes I'd love to hear them. I've got the SS source code and have been diving into the functions disk.cpp is providing to manage volumes. Given that a large chunk is upper-level and present in the OS, not sure how far I'll get with this approach.

Thank you!
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Ronald P. Regensburg
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Re: Drive Setup in Mac OS 9.0.4

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

Drive Setup will not work in SheepShaver. On real classic Mac hardware it worked with SCSI drives only.

Whatever you intended to do with Drive Setup will have to be done in a different way. What did you want to achieve with Drive Setup?
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Cat_7
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Re: Drive Setup in Mac OS 9.0.4

Post by Cat_7 »

I guess it has to do with the disk driver used.
IIRC SheepShaver runs of a giant floppy, not an actual hard disk image.

Best,
Cat_7
copland_kid
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Re: Drive Setup in Mac OS 9.0.4

Post by copland_kid »

Cat_7 wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 8:52 pm I guess it has to do with the disk driver used.
IIRC SheepShaver runs of a giant floppy, not an actual hard disk image.

Best,
Cat_7
Ohh, that's great to know, thank you. I didn't realize it wasn't using an emulation of a basic HDD driver. Appreciate the clarification.
copland_kid
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Re: Drive Setup in Mac OS 9.0.4

Post by copland_kid »

Ronald P. Regensburg wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 8:08 pm Drive Setup will not work in SheepShaver. On real classic Mac hardware it worked with SCSI drives only.

Whatever you intended to do with Drive Setup will have to be done in a different way. What did you want to achieve with Drive Setup?
Thank you for the clarification. I'll find another another mechanism. I wanted to be able to partition a disk for some experimentation. I can find another route to take.
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Ronald P. Regensburg
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Re: Drive Setup in Mac OS 9.0.4

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

Just curious. Why partition a disk image volume for SheepShaver (if at all possible)? I would simply add another disk image.
copland_kid
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Re: Drive Setup in Mac OS 9.0.4

Post by copland_kid »

Ronald P. Regensburg wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 9:43 pm Just curious. Why partition a disk image volume for SheepShaver (if at all possible)? I would simply add another disk image.
It's a very finicky piece of bespoke software and am trying to recreate the original machine setup. I can find another mechanism, but thanks for answering my question!
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