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Can I run a “floppy-less” SE with System 6.0.8?
Posted by: 1200XL M.U.L.E. on 2024-06-25 08:55:12
I’m restoring an SE that has two 800kB floppy drives. One drive barely reads/writes. its head is probably out of alignment. The second drive reads just fine but corrupts whatever disk I feed into it. With the help of my Centris 650, I was able to is install System 6.0.8 on a hard drive image file managed by a ZuluSCSI device.

I’d like to go floppy-less. Will my SE throw a fit if it cannot identify a floppy drive on boot up? Are there any applications or utilities that absolutely require a physical drive?

Assuming I can run the machine floppy-less, is there a way to mount floppy disk images on the SE with System 6.0.8 so I can install software from Mac Repo and Mac Garden?

Thanks!
Posted by: obsolete on 2024-06-25 08:59:14
No problem. I run my SE with a ZuluSCSI and the (bad) floppy drive unplugged and it's quite happy to do so. I use MountImage 1.1b3 (available from Mac Garden, etc.) to mount disk images in 6.0.8.
Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-06-25 09:07:31
That will work great. If you also find you want to get rids of those drives, feel free to dump them on me for shipping on my dime.
Posted by: Fred1212 on 2024-06-25 18:40:03
You could try refurbishing the floppy and realigning the head
Posted by: 1200XL M.U.L.E. on 2024-06-26 07:05:25
Awesome! Last night I tried MountImage and it worked like a charm. It seems to only mount disk images made by Disk Copy. Is there anything that can mount and work with raw image files? For example, I downloaded raw disk images of the installation sources for MS Excel. It’s seven disks with a file extension of .img. Or, is there a conversion tool that will turn these into Disk Copy format?
Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-06-26 09:49:44
Raw disk files are the bane of my existence. I hate them because the emulator crowd just loves to use them…but they are a beast on target period hardware. Everything should be in DC42, IMHO. What do you need? I may be able to get you a disk copy version.
Posted by: LaPorta on 2024-06-26 09:51:00
Awesome! Last night I tried MountImage and it worked like a charm. It seems to only mount disk images made by Disk Copy. Is there anything that can mount and work with raw image files? For example, I downloaded raw disk images of the installation sources for MS Excel. It’s seven disks with a file extension of .img. Or, is there a conversion tool that will turn these into Disk Copy format?

In your specific case, they may be Disk Copy 6 images, which will not work with MountImage. They have the same .img extension, so it is hard to tell. Can you point me to them? I’ll take a look.
Posted by: 1200XL M.U.L.E. on 2024-06-26 20:15:29
The MS Excel 4.0 sit file can be found on the Mac Garden. There's an English version and a Finnish version. I'm looking at the English version.
Posted by: Fred1212 on 2024-06-26 21:27:50
Have you tried diskcopy 6.3, drag and drop the files onto it?
Just read you are running system 6.0.8 so can't use 6.3, maybe get a system 7 on your Zulu
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