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Author Topic: Sun SCSI Card Issues  (Read 11692 times)

AlexTheCat123

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Sun SCSI Card Issues
« on: March 16, 2022, 03:54:11 pm »
I just put together a Sun Remarketing SCSI card and I'm trying to get it to work in my Lisa. When I boot Macworks Plus 1.0.18 off a floppy disk, I see the hard disk's activity light flash once right at the end of the "Loading........." screen and then the computer immediately reboots, which makes no sense. I don't have an OS on the hard drive (it's just a blank HFS-formatted drive), so I don't expect it to boot off the drive, but this behavior doesn't make any sense to me.

When I try booting into System 6 off my ArduinoFile (still with MacWorks Plus 1.0.18), the SCSI drive's activity light no longer flashes when MacWorks gets to the blinking floppy screen and the computer proceeds to boot into the OS off the ArduinoFile just fine, but there is no evidence of the SCSI drive's existence once we're in the operating system. I've tried to look for a manual online for the SCSI card to see if I'm missing something, but I can't seem to find the manual anywhere. By the way, I've tried both a SCSI2SD and an actual SCSI hard drive and they both give the same results. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this isn't working? Is there some extra step I'm missing that gets MacWorks to recognize the drive?
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rayarachelian

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Re: Sun SCSI Card Issues
« Reply #1 on: March 16, 2022, 04:35:07 pm »
Can you try this first? http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/scsiprobe

also you might need a third party scsi formatting tool like SCSI Director, FWB, Lido, though I'm not sure which of those will work with a Lisa.
Mac SCSI drives have to be apple branded for the Apple formatter in their device/vendor name to work. also they add a driver partition to the drive which is needed. the third party ones aren't so picky about drive brand. Apple's HD Setup is, and looks for the device to have "Apple" in the device name.
You might be able to fool it if you change the setting on the SCSI2SD to say Apple. There was some hack many years ago to get Apple's driver to ignore that so you could use regular Seagate or whatever brand drives.
Here's some starting pointers:
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You don't know what it's like, you don't have a clue, if you did you'd find yourselves doing the same thing, too, Writing the code, Writing the code

AlexTheCat123

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Re: Sun SCSI Card Issues
« Reply #2 on: March 16, 2022, 08:09:04 pm »
Thanks Ray! The SCSI Probe utility saw the drive and allowed me to mount it and everything is working great now! I didn't know that you could use a standard SCSI utility like that with MacWorks; I always assumed that you would have to use some special program from Sun to mount/initialize the drive.
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rayarachelian

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Re: Sun SCSI Card Issues
« Reply #3 on: March 16, 2022, 10:58:55 pm »
Hi @AlexTheCat123,

So, small (hopefully) request.

Once you get it to the point where it boots off the 1st MacWorks floppy and boots directly into macos system 6.x or whatever the max version that will run on it, could you zip/7z/tar.xz up your scsi2sd config + volume and post in the files section? That would help people here out as a shortcut. I'm sure it will likely work with other things like scsi.blu or RaSCSI with a bit of massaging.

Maybe you could add some useful tools to the hard disk image such as SCSI Probe (obviously useful), DiskCopy 4.2, DART, ResEdit and ZTerm, CompactPro, StuffIt, HQX, and anything else shareware/freeware you and others might find useful, too.

I've heard but not verified that MacWorks has a limit of 32MB volumes, so maybe aim for that size, or experiment and see if it will do more.

The big deal portion is getting it to boot which requires that scsi driver partition thing discussed in the links above, and I don't really know which will work on a Lisa w/MacWorks, hence the ask. This will save anyone with a SCSI card all that hard work. :)
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You don't know what it's like, you don't have a clue, if you did you'd find yourselves doing the same thing, too, Writing the code, Writing the code

AlexTheCat123

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Re: Sun SCSI Card Issues
« Reply #4 on: March 17, 2022, 11:06:24 am »
Quote
Once you get it to the point where it boots off the 1st MacWorks floppy and boots directly into macos system 6.x or whatever the max version that will run on it, could you zip/7z/tar.xz up your scsi2sd config + volume and post in the files section? That would help people here out as a shortcut. I'm sure it will likely work with other things like scsi.blu or RaSCSI with a bit of massaging.

Once I get it to actually boot off the drive, I'll be happy to post the disk image for other people to use!
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Lisa2

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Re: Sun SCSI Card Issues
« Reply #5 on: March 17, 2022, 04:58:02 pm »
Quote from: rayarachelian on March 16, 2022, 10:58:55 pm
I've heard but not verified that MacWorks has a limit of 32MB volumes, so maybe aim for that size, or experiment and see if it will do more.

For parallel port drives:
MacWorks  Plus  1.0.18 has a 32 MB volume size limit
MacWorks  Plus  1.1h has a 2GB volume size limit

But for SCSI drives:
The volume size limit is 2GB ( the HFS limit for System 6 ).
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