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Re: booting 8500 with blank disk (was Re: Unidentified subject!)



On Thu, Feb 24, 2000 at 12:15:23PM +0100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> I'm not sure you can use dd with a MacOS DiskCopy image, I think they
> contain a header. Also, miBoot need to be configured via ResEdit on
> MacOS. This will change, but the current version of miBoot was mostly
> made for bootable CDs.

You can use dd with (the data fork of) a MacOS DiskCopy image, as long
as it was created as a read/write image (not sure if read-only works;
read-only compressed definitely doesn't).  I've checked.  You can also
use plain binary images you get onto a Mac HD from Disk Copy as long
as they are precisely long enough to fill a 1.44 floppy (checked this
too by writing debian images from Disk Copy; had to pad some with zeros
to get the right length but then they worked).

Also, if you're handy with a hex editor, it's possible to configure
miBoot from Linux or *BSD; Apple documents the resource file format
at <URL:http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/MoreToolbox/MoreToolbox-99.html>.

Admittedly this is somewhat deceptive as regards the base for one
of the offsets into the file; I'm therefore including some perl
source which illustrates (sort of) the process of parsing a
resource file.

Oh, and: you can read a .sit file on Linux (and presumably *BSD with
an emulator or a recompile or a few tweaks to the source).  See
<ftp://ftp.ibp.fr/pub/linux/sunsite/utils/compress/macutils.tar.gz>
if it ever comes back up or the debian source tarball for the
'macutils' package otherwise.  That is, unless it's in
StuffIt(tm&backatyou) 5 format which AFAIK is too new for the latest
version of this and leaves you up the proverbial creek ... somehow
I can't remember if such is the case for miBoot (*checks*) oops,
damn, looks like it is.  Well, there's always that thing on NT, it's
by the same company that makes the Real Thing so it should be up to
date with the latest secret decoder ring or whatnot.

Hope this helps.

--
James Deikun, Techie(tm), CSI Multimedia
The opinions expressed &c.

Attachment: dumprsrc.pl
Description: Perl program


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