Re: Lisa Office System images to floppy via PC?

It's Alive!

Ok, so over the last few weeks I managed to get a bit of ageing mac hardware. I picked up a Power Macinosh 7200/75 w/out a keyboard, mouse or monitor. Later I found a Apple Multiscan 15AV display and a keyboard and mouse. Though in order to get the keyboard, mouse and screen I had to pick up Macintosh Quadra 950 (w/ 128 MB RAM), a HP ScanJet 4C Scanner and a bunch of parts which include a Quadra 900 and a 950 motherboard. So my once 1/2 empty office is now getting quite crowded.

That said, I have managed to get the 7200, running OS 7.5.2, online with an old version of Netscape 4. I downloaded the Lisa OS 3.1 and apps. From there, I installed the Lisa Office System 3.1 and the associated apps. Now we are playing with fire!

When I installed the LOS, it asked me if I wanted to partition the HD for MacXL, so I split the drive in 1/2. Is there a 20MB widget HD??? As, I gave 10 to LOS and 10 for MacXL, maybe the numbers weren't in MB. After installing all the apps, if I look at the attributes for the "Internal Hard Disk" it says the "Total Blocks : 9418".

I also plugged in my external Profile HD. It appears to be recognized by LOS as it shows up as a "disk" with "Total blocks: 9690", but it can also be booted from into Lisa Workshop. Is it partitioned into 2???

Anyways, all is well in Lisa land except 2 things. I have been trying to download MacWorksXL3.0 and MacWorksXL3.0 System Disk from The Mothership, and though I can download them fine on my 7200, Stuffit always reports that the headers are corrupt and then locks up the 7200 when trying to extract them. Anybody experienced problems with these images???

The 2nd issue I have remaining is repairing my Lisa's keyboard. As is, I have to opperate the keyboard with the keys off. If I use my fingers directly on the contacts, everything works fine, but 1/2 the foam behind the keys is defunct and need to be replace.

Well, that is all for now on my journey to get this Lisa up and running.

On Jan 7, 3:34 am, James MacPhail <g..._at_email.domain.hidden> wrote:
> >wondering if there is a way to write these images onto floppies via a
> >Windows 98 pc rather than a Mac
>
> In general, no. The 400K Lisa/Mac disks use GCR encoding, and PC floppy
> disk hardware supports only MFM encoding.
>
> There are rare pieces of hardware that can do GCR on the PC, such as the
> Central Point "Deluxe Option Board" and the Catweasel. However, AFAIK, none
> of these support the common Lisa/Mac disk image file formats you can
> download.
>
> Most later 68K and PowerPC Macs have a "superdrive" 1.4MB floppy drive with
> a SWIM controller that can do both GCR and MFM.
>
> >wanted to install/boot into something other than the workshop that was
> >installed on the Widget HD.
>
> IIRC, there was a "Macintosh transfer" program for the workshop. It would
> allow you to format a 400k disk for use by a Mac, and copy files to it (and
> perhaps from it). It was part of the "Mac Supplement" distributed to early
> Macintosh developers, since the Lisa was the original development platform
> for the Mac.
>
> This would predate the DiskCopy and DART formats, so you would need to get
> plain/binary files to the widget/workshop drive for use by the Mac transfer
> program. I suspect you could achieve this using the workshop's serial port
> transfer program. But, it would require that you find individual files
> (maybe two forks per file) to download to the PC (or PC software to decode
> the DiskCopy or DART images), or write a workshop program to decode the
> images yourself. It also requires that your workshop installation is
> working.
>
> In short, not impossible, but probably too much effort.
>
> I think your best options are:
>
> 1) Pick up a used Mac with a floppy drive. For the purpose of making disks
> from images, it can even be a G3 PowerPC, but there is an advantage to
> choosing a Mac that can run System/MacOS 8.0 or earlier: These systems can
> mount and read/write GCR Macintosh MFS disks (such as made by MacWorks XL)
> in the Finder. MFS support was dropped in MacOS 8.1.
>
> 2) Find a nearby enthusiast to make some floppies for you to get started
>
> HTH,
>
> James
>
> James MacPhail                   "Think not of engineering as art,
> uo..._at_email.domain.hidden                 but of art as engineering"
> Sigma Seven Systems Ltd.
> ja..._at_email.domain.hidden        <http://SigmaSevenSystems.com>
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