Re: Write IIgs disks from Mac ?

["william strutts" <wrstrutts1@home.com>]

"Steven Palm" <n9yty@bigfoot.com> wrote in message
news:n9yty-2806012210280001@192.168.42.242...
>
> I was a Commodore person in the old days... Vic-20 through the Amiga.
> Then I had a brief stint with PC's, Windows, etc, and in the last three
> years or so have moved entirely to Macintosh.  Now, I'm in nostalgia mode,
> and managed to get myself an Apple IIgs.  Territory I never explored
> before, and I find it interesting.

I was a RS Coco person in the old days.  I had a Coco I and III.  Then
a Mac Plus owner and now Windows machines.

>
> It's a ROM3 machine with a 1MB expansion board in it.  I have two 3.5"
> floppies, and two 5.25" drives.  I understand it can only support two at a
> time, but I thought it might be useful for various combinations of copying
> disks.

You can had two of 3.5 and 5.25 on the machine at once.  The 3.5" drives
must be first hooked up and then the 5.25" drives.

> But...   I have no system disks, and trying to create them has been
> interesting to say the least.
>
> I have tried, using a PowerPC 6100 at work under MacOS 9.1, to make disks
> from the System disks from Apple and other sources I've found.  DiskCopy
> reports a successful disk creation, but when I try to boot I get a "UNABLE
> TO LOAD PRODOS" or similar error message.

Forget the PowerPC macs,  they used different drives than the ones
the IIgs can read from reliably.  The Mac Classic, SE, Plus and Mac
II line is the one you should use to make Prodos disk.

> Now, I also tried making the same disk on my Classic at home using
> DiskCopy 4.2 and System 7.1, and it worked fine.  Strange...
>
> I then loaded DiskCopy 4.2 on the PowerPC 6100 at work and tried again
> from the same image file, and it couldn't make a bootable disk.  I took a
> drive out of the Apple IIgs enclosure, put it into the 6100, and wrote the
> disk again.  Still no go.  I put the Mac drive into the IIgs enclosure,
> and it would boot the one I made on the Classic, but not anything made on
> the 6100.

The Mac 1.44 meg drives need a special controller for the IIgs.  The
IIgs only supports the older 800K disk.

> Does any of this ring a bell?   In order to write a useful image, do I
> have to be running older system software (7.1?)?  This is the only
> variable that seems to be making the difference, or is it in the hardware
> controller of the 6100?  These were all attempted on DS/DD disks, not HD
> disks.

Older drives which are from Sony not the newer drives which won't
work correctly.

>
> On a side note, I've found that the company (allelec?) still has HD units
> available, and I'll probably spend the money just to get it operational to
> put down with the Classic in my "What a marvel for their time" museum.
> Then again, it's not like their useless, and I'm sure before it get's
> "filed away" I'll have some great fun playing around with it all for at
> least a few months.
>
> Please e-mail suggestions/answers if you can.
--
--
William R. Strutts - wrstrutts1@home.com - Whatever!

C'est moi!  http://www.facelink.com/wrstrutts

Just hacking away...