Mounting an MS-DOS Mac disk on SheepShaver

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

Moderators: Cat_7, Ronald P. Regensburg, ClockWise

Post Reply
bjb
Space Cadet
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:21 pm

Mounting an MS-DOS Mac disk on SheepShaver

Post by bjb »

So I have a few old 3.5" floppy disks that I'm going through that I formatted as MS-DOS back in the day, but ended up populating them with Macintosh files/apps/whatever. As such, the filenames are obfuscated, the forks are subdirectories, and in general they're only really sensible to a Mac that still can read them. I typically did this back then because I used ShapeShifter on my Amiga (yes, registered! >grin<) which couldn't read a REAL Mac disk and I could shuttle files back-and-forth from work-to-home.

Fast-forward 27 years and I'm trying to mount these floppies on SheepShaver using an external USB floppy connected to my modern-day Mac. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I can't figure out how to mount the darn things so that I can see them in all their Mac OS Classic glory - either it is viewed as a UNIX extfs or MacOS 7.5.x just thinks it is an uninitialized disk and is asking me to make it a Mac 7K disk.

Is there a way to mount this directly? I did try adding to the config 'disk /Volumes/Untitled' but that gives me the 7K option. Making it extfs just makes it appear as the "MS-DOS files". Ideally, I'd like to NOT have to re-configure the 3.5" every time I change disks, but I realize that might be asking a lot :-)

Ideas?
User avatar
adespoton
Forum All-Star
Posts: 4226
Joined: Fri Nov 27, 2009 5:11 am
Location: Emaculation.com
Contact:

Re: Mounting an MS-DOS Mac disk on SheepShaver

Post by adespoton »

You'll need to image the disks somehow. Since they're formatted as FAT16, you'll be able to mount them still and then use a disk imager to write the disk blocks to a file. SheepShaver should then be able to mount the disk image, although I'd go with Mac OS 9 instead of System 7.5, to ensure more robust support.
bjb
Space Cadet
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:21 pm

Re: Mounting an MS-DOS Mac disk on SheepShaver

Post by bjb »

That worked. I put the disk into the USB drive, unmounted the image, 'sudo dd if=/dev/disk5 of=macfloppy.img', then added the macfloppy.img as a disk on SheepShaver and viola!

thanks!
Post Reply