On Feb 16, 10:54 pm, Andrew Warkentin <andr..._at_email.domain.hidden> wrote:
> Can you boot from the ProFile with UniPlus on it? If you can, it should
> be fairly easy to make an image of it (use a crossover/"null modem"
> cable, and dd the hard disk device to the serial port device; you could
> also try making a tarball of the entire filesystem and it might be
> possible to re-construct an image from it somehow). At least then there
> would be an image that could probably be run in an emulator, even if the
> floppies are bad.
Ah, if only there *were* a "ProFile with UniPlus on it". I, like most of my classmates, reformatted my ProFile for MacWorks -- back when UniPlus was just a poor use of a perfectly good Mac XL. If anyone had told us it was destined for obscurity as a historical footnote, we probably would've cheered. :-/
I actually have two ProFiles, one of which had its MacWorks installation corrupted when its power supply blew. I repaired the PS, and I just this week tried installing UniPlus to it from the floppies. As I said in my initial post, the installation hung, maybe because there was a read error that didn't get reported, but more likely because I'm down to half the original 1MB of RAM. Running UniPlus in 1MB was kind of a squeeze, and running it in 512KB is probably hopeless.
The critical part of the floppy series is the first two disks. The first one is the boot disk, and the second contains enough of the UNIX filesystem to start loading tar streams from the rest of the diskettes. I imagine that the remaining 16 disks are "standard enough" Sys V that it'll be easier to reconstruct around any remaining errors.
I'm posting photos of the diskettes this afternoon on my "extra-info" page, here:
http://www.brandenburgs.us/~jeffb/ebay/lisa/lisanotes.html
They were relabeled for the "VPI distribution", but the second set of labels have mostly come loose now, so I've got another shot showing the original labels that have been exposed. Here are the labels:
boot/serialization A
root filesystem C ("B" scrawled in red pen over "C")
1 of 5 (root/utility) 2 of 5 (root/utility) 3 of 5 (root/utility) 4 of 5 (root/utility) 5 of 5 (root/utility) 1 of 3 (C Development) 2 of 3 (C Development) 3 of 3 (C Development) 1 of 3 (root supple.) 2 of 3 (root supple.) 3 of 3 (root supple.) 1 of 1 (UUCP)
All but the first two disks are helpfully labeled with the command to restore them, "tar xvf /dev/s0a".
It would be lovely, of course, if I could restore this entire series
onto my own ProFile on my own machine, but it looks like that isn't
going to be practical -- even if I were keeping my machine, and it had
a full complement of working RAM, I wouldn't be able to get past the
read errors. So the next best thing is to recover what we can from
the diskettes, with Ray's help, and try to emulate around the
serialization. Since the serialization is only in the boot loader, I
imagine it won't be too hard to circumv... er, repair. The second
disk is probably a standard UNIX filesystem, and the rest are all
plain-vanilla tar, which I already know I can read on a Mac II under A/
UX.
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Received on 2015-07-15 16:42:55
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