Partitions - Macintosh Garden

This page is a wiki. Please login or create an account to begin editing.

13 posts / 0 new

Last post

2009, October 19 - 10:53am

spooky

Offline

Joined: 2009 Sep 27

Partitions

Hi,
Being new to this side of Macs I'm not sure if the following is possible.

If an app/game crashes the OS it's a lot of hassle having to dig out my dock, dock my Duo, connect the external floppy drive and boot off a Disk Tools 1 disk and run Disk First Aid.

I was thinking, is it possible to make a small partition and copy the contents of Disk Tools 1 to the partition and boot off that partition should I need to?

If it is possible, is there a non destructive way of repartitioning a drive as on a PC?
Does anyone have any 68k compatible software that'd do the trick?

Comments

2009, October 19 - 3:24pm

MacWise

Offline

Joined: 2009 Apr 29

Yes and no. You can make a small partition and boot from it, but to the best of my knowledge, there's no way (at least on Classic) of doing so without reformating the entire hard drive first.

For the curious, here's a tutorial about this subject for Mac OS X:

http://www.ffnn.nl/pages/articles/apple-mac-os-x/nondestructive-partitio...

2009, October 19 - 5:24pm

(Reply to #2) #3

spooky

Offline

Joined: 2009 Sep 27

Just my luck!

Other than disk first aid, are there any other recommended disk repair utilities?

Also, is there a way of choosing which system/partition to boot from (some sort of boot menu) without having to boot an OS and select the startup disk from the control panel?

2009, October 19 - 7:29pm

SwedeBear

Offline

Joined: 2009 Apr 18

Else but Disk First Aid I´d say NDD; Norton Disk Doctor. There´s probably more but I think Dr Norton might be a good choice.
I´ve a faint memory of some little app that actually let you house two or more System Folders on the same disk/partitition, but I´m not sure if this is from the pre-OS 7-era or not.
My 2öre.

2009, October 19 - 7:38pm

bertyboy

Offline

Joined: 2009 Jun 14

If there's something already in the disk space to be used by the small partition you're gong to create, then you need a reformat whatever the OS.

No Startup Menu as such on old hardware, it is a case of booting from the first bootable partition and then re-booting. But I remember it being smart enough that if you had a completely toasted system folder in one partition, Mac hardware was smart enough to move to the next partition and try that,

2009, October 19 - 11:00pm

spooky

Offline

Joined: 2009 Sep 27

Fate is conspiring against me!
The apple disk format and partitioning tool is throwing up errors when I do a surface test scan.

I tried formatting with the utility from the OS 7.6 Disk Utilities 1 disk and then did a test, it didnt complete.
I tried using the equivalent util from OS 8 and chose in the advanced options to do a low level format and zero out all data and still a surface scan cannot complete.

Looks like I need a new SCSI drive for my Duo but at the prices I saw on ebay it isnt worth it.
Around 200 pounds for a refurb scsi drive that's smaller than the one I currently have, plus I'd have to import it.

2009, October 19 - 11:32pm

Balrog

Offline

Joined: 2009 Apr 24

I have a bunch of SCSI laptop drives but I don't know if I want to get rid of them yet. If you have a Duo 2300, it can take an IDE drive with the proper cable. If it has a trackpad, it likely already has an IDE drive. There is a CF to SCSI adapter available but it costs $100 ... still it's nice to have an 8GB solid state drive in one of those Duos.

See http://artmix.com/CF_powermon.html . These appear on eBay often enough, and I believe the guy who runs the site speaks English.

2009, October 20 - 7:01am

SwedeBear

Offline

Joined: 2009 Apr 18

@spooky: if you have the time try to wipe the disk completely. Then re-initialize it to set things straight again, if possible. This wipe can be done with Norton Utilities or FWB Harddisk Tools, both available from here. FWB initialised disks are recognized by Apples HD Utilities IIRC. This is meant as a last resort. If you have the dreaded 'click'-sound it´s more than likely to be off it´s rockers. HTH!

2009, October 20 - 7:51am

bertyboy

Offline

Joined: 2009 Jun 14

If you can take IDE drives, I have an old 4GB and an old 20GB pulled from my old PBG3 and PBG4.

2009, October 20 - 12:20pm

#10

spooky

Offline

Joined: 2009 Sep 27

It's a 68k Duo 280c with 12mb RAM with a SCSI drive.
I think that model is SCSI only from what I've read.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'm going to try some things out now I've got time today.

I'll try the Norton Wipe first.

I tried installing the version of FWB Toolkit on this site in Basilisk but it refused to install, I think it's PPC only - does anyone have a 68k version of FWB Toolkit?

I've read about a few other utils but haven't been able to find out much info on them, let alone find them.
Does Anubis, Lido or Silverlining ring any bells?

Oh, and no clicks, it sounds fine, I'm just getting file corruption and the surface tests quit with messages along the lines of "too many errors".

Ironic it started as I was considering how to make a disk checking partition...

2009, October 20 - 3:36pm

#11

SwedeBear

Offline

Joined: 2009 Apr 18

Ok, spooky, got a package containing Lido, Anubis, SCSI Director (recommended) and some more. Tested these three under Basilisk and they started up fine; no PPC only! The programs are StuffIt:ed separately inside this ZIP-archive. Unstuff in a Mac environment, else you only get a bunch of documents instead of working applications. Here´s the stuff. HTH!

2009, October 20 - 10:30pm

(Reply to #11) #12

spooky

Offline

Joined: 2009 Sep 27

Wow, what a collection!
Anubis didnt want to know, but Lido did the trick - after using Lido Anubis then picked it up.

To anyone else with disk problems or if you want to keep an eye on the health of your drive, I found Lido very easy to use.
It even lets you tweak the cache settings, change the HDD icons, adjust the startup delay as well as more standard things like bad sector scans.

Thanks so much for that SwedeBear!

I can only assume that there was a file system error of some sort that the Apple utilities wasn't removing with a format because I've ran numerous sector scans and it's all fine.

It makes you think just how many Macs or SCSI drives people have thrown out or packed away just because the Apple disk utilities cant fix the problem.

2009, October 20 - 3:48pm

#13

spooky

Offline

Joined: 2009 Sep 27

It's raining here so have had plenty of time to go hunting for disk utils and I was actually surprised at what I found!

I've found archives of lots of old Mac software including games, utils, apps, etc, so here are the links in no particular order..

I found a 68k version of Anubis on here:
http://www.fenestrated.net/~macman/stuff/SiliconExpress/

Drivers for Macs, including an archive of SCSI utils:
http://www.macdrivermuseum.net/

Micronet SCSI utils:
http://www.jwgdesign.com/macsupport.htm

An archive of all sorts of software, not had time to browse it all yet:
http://www.umich.edu/~archive/mac/

Links to various sites hosting software for System 6, I've not looked through them all yet but some of them are dead links:
http://68kmla.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2162

I'm off to try Anubis on the drive now.