Convert physical Mac hard drive to disk image

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haydentech
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Convert physical Mac hard drive to disk image

Post by haydentech »

I have a fully-set-up PowerMacintosh 6500/250 running MacOS 9.0.4 that I would like to convert and use as a SheepShaver disk image. Is this possible?
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adespoton
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Re: Convert physical Mac hard drive to disk image

Post by adespoton »

haydentech wrote: Fri Nov 12, 2021 7:32 pm I have a fully-set-up PowerMacintosh 6500/250 running MacOS 9.0.4 that I would like to convert and use as a SheepShaver disk image. Is this possible?
Yup. Since you don't need the driver partition, you can just create a disk image and copy the contents of the drive to it. If less than half the drive is filled up, the image can even be written to the boot drive. Otherwise, you'll need to mount a secondary drive, remote-mount an appleshare volume with the disk image on it, or mount the HFS+ partition on another computer and copy the files off that way.

In fact, if the Mac is networked, you can just share the entire drive via AppleShare IP and copy the entire contents into a disk image or SheepShaver. You may have to boot off another image to do the initial blessing of the system folder on that disk image, but after that it *should* just boot. I say *should* because it's possible the original hardware won't be a precise match for what SS is expecting, so you may have to do some manual fiddling of system extensions and system file to get it bootable.
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