Re: trying to get an Apple II GS going for fun...

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

wizard@direct.ca (Astro) wrote:

>Oh first, re: 3.5" 800k floppies. People keep telling me I don't
>actually need to search blank ones out, because you can simply put
>little stickers over the little hole on the upper left of a 3.5" 1.44
>meg floppy which will cause a Mac to interpret the floppy as an 800k
>floppy.

Uh, this MIGHT work for short term storage.  The info literally
dissipates from the media and in hours, days, or weeks, your
info will be gone if you try to use a double density drive to
write to a 1.44MB disk (formatted to 800k).  Sometimes, the info
does not stick even long enough to take the disk out of the Mac
and put it into the IIGS' drive.

>So this is what I did. I downloaded off the Apple web site the system
>disk file for System 6.0.1 [since I can't find system 5.0.4 posted
>ANYWHERE... weird... not even on the Apple web site], I downloaded
>this file to my PC and copied it to a 1.44 meg floppy. I then prepared
>a separate floppy with the stickers over the hole as described above.
>I took both these floppys to a Mac I know. I mounted the 1.44 meg
>floppy and copied the system file to the Mac desktop. Then I mounted
>the sticker-prepared floppy and formatted it to 800k. That worked
>fine. Then I copied the system file off the Mac desktop to the
>prepared 800k floppy. I brought this "system disk" to my Apple IIGS
>and put it in the drive and powered up the Apple. Well, nothing
>happened... Actually, the only thing that happened was that the drive
>didn't automatically spit out the disk like it did when I had a 1.44
>meg floppy in there at one point. I guess because it didn't spit out
>the disk, it accepted the formatting.
>
>It didn't boot into an OS tho. Could be for a number of reasons.
>System 6.0.1 will not boot into my ROM 01 rudimentary Apple II GS? The
>system file was not properly copied onto the prepared floppy? The
>system file was tainted by a "PC" identifier? I downloaded the wrong
>file from Apple [Mac Binary and not Binhex]? My disk drive is screwed?

The bare bones System Disk that Apple ships with the System 6.0.1
disks is specially made to boot with only 1MB.  Thus, your ROM 01
unit with 1MB should boot it fine.  This is possible because Apple
removed the sounds, extensions, most fonts, most FSTs, most desk
accessories, and most drivers from this disk.  A hard drive install,
on the other hand, is usually a full install, which pushes memory
requirements way over 1MB.

My guess would be that the data dissipated from the disk before
the IIGS had a chance to boot it.  Or some of the data.  If the data
from the boot block has dissipated, the IIGS will not be able to
boot the disk.

If you are in the Vancouver area, you might just take a couple
of blank disks over to the Apples BC Computer Society, a users
group well known to Apple II users not only in Vancouver, but
all over the Apple II (especially IIGS) world, and copy disks
and programs of your choice.  Good luck!