Imaging SCSI Macintoshes - Macintosh Garden

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2012, July 11 - 8:05pm

thecrazyone

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Joined: 2012 Jul 11

Imaging SCSI Macintoshes

Hey,

I'm a Mac collector from Germany with a three-digit number of vintage Macintosh computers in my collection, most of them 68k and SCSI only.

I'd like to start imaging the hard disks of these Macs since many of them have lots of interesting software installed. But it's very hard work to open the cases, remove the disks and connect them to a G4 with a SCSI card to extract the data from the disk via Disk Utility on OS X, put the disks back into the machine and reassemble them.

Maybe you know a better and easier way to backup the drives of SCSI Macs in a great number? I thought about hooking a Mac as-is to my G4 with a SCSI card to use the vintage macs as a kind of external SCSI housing, but honestly I have no idea if this is going to work in any way or might cause damage. I don't think I can change the SCSI ID of the card in my G4, so it probably will collide with the other Mac's controller?!

Maybe there's some great imaging software which runs on System 6, so I can image the internal disk directly to a file on an external SCSI drive? It would be important that I'm able to use the image on a modern Mac, so a standard file format would be of great importance.

Any ideas on how to simply backup a number of SCSI and/or IDE Macs is highly appreciated

Thanks a lot,
The crazy one.

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2012, July 11 - 9:39pm

24bit

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Joined: 2010 Nov 19

G4 with a SCSI card to use the vintage macs as a kind of external SCSI housing

Should work principally, if you pull the flat ribbon cable from the vintage Mac´s logic board and terminate the bus accordingly. The vintage Mac´s SCSI ID would be needed to avoid a mess on the G4´s SCSI bus. Internal HDDs were usually set to ID=0, CD-ROM to ID=3, 7 was the cpu of course.

Did you try networking the Ethernet Macs with a Windows box or a modern Mac?
Dave or PCMacLan would spring to mind for PCs and AppleTalk ELAP up to 10.5.

IDEs could be taken out and read with some IDE to USB adapter from a modern Mac. DiskUtility can make DMG or IMG clones of the HDDs.

You will know that a installed app from a vintage Mac may be useless without the proper platform or emulator to run it. If some installed files in the donor Mac´s System folder get lost, the app may be inoperative at all.
Still its a good idea to preserve everything that can be rescued.

2012, July 11 - 9:54pm

(Reply to #2) #3

thecrazyone

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Joined: 2012 Jul 11

Ah, wir haben ja gerade telefoniert .

Of course, using Ethernet on Macs that have it available isn't the problem. I also don't want to achieve a copy of some of the files - I'd like to get a bit-exact image of the disks in case things go wrong. Old hard disks die as we know .

Imaging IDE and SCSI disks by removing them from the computer isn't the problem - I'd just like to find an easier way of getting bit-exact images of the built in disks without disassembling and reassembling ~100 machines...

I've read somewhere that if you push the interrupt button just after powering up the machine (which will crash it with a sad mac sound), the SCSI controller won't be init'ed yet and you can use the the computer just as if it was an external SCSI HD - like the FireWire target mode on later machines.

Did anybody try this? Any other ideas?

Thanks a lot,
thecrazyone

2012, July 12 - 5:59am

Northcott

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Joined: 2009 Aug 15

There's a Wikipedia article about it (it's on the page for "Target Disk Mode"), and there are a few articles from various blogs that talk about it. Assuming your G4's SCSI card has a 25 pin external port, you should be able to just press the interrupt button on the classic Mac as it's booting and plug its external SCSI into the G4s external port. Power on the G4 and it should be there. There's a prohibition on SCSI IDs--drives connected to your G4s chain have to have unique IDs--but assuming the classic Mac is the only drive on your chain, that shouldn't be an issue.

I've never actually done this but I've read about it and the theory is sound:)

2012, July 18 - 5:23pm

MacSarcinaRat

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Joined: 2011 Nov 6

Depending on the size of the drives in the machines you want to image, here a couple of other thoughts.

First approach if the machines contents can fit onto a single CD. You could prepare an external burning drive station with an external boot HD partitioned with a boot volume and a CD prep volume, Toast, SCSI burner. Image drive to the prep volume, then burn from there.

A second approach assumes they have a range of different hard drive sizes. This is what I would do considering the number of machines you have. Find an old PC that can run Windows 2000 Server and set up File Services for Macintosh. This box can support System 6 or 7 clients. Standard AppleShare volume size limits apply. Assuming the machines you want to image only have built in AppleTalk you will need to find a PC LocalTalk card of some description for the Windows 2000 server.

The advantage of the second method is set and forget. Boot machine with a Network Boot disk, fire up DiskCopy or some other imaging application like Norton Backup, go away and do something else. Add as much disk space as you want to the PC, burn the images to another media as time allows.

2012, July 20 - 1:54pm

Balrog

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Joined: 2009 Apr 24

I prefer using a PC or other machine that can run Linux or OS X, a SCSI card, and the 'ddrescue' utility. This way the images are complete, including all unallocated blocks and any interesting stuff.

Mac-compatible SCSI cards are rather easy to get: the Atto ExpressPCI ul3d and ul4d are great and support Deep Sleep in even the latest G4s and PCI-X G5s. For older machines, I recommend the Adaptec 2930U and 29160 series (the Mac compatible line — though afaik, a PC version card can be re-flashed with the Mac utilities in OS 9).