Apple A/UX 3.0.0, 3.0.1, 3.1 installation media and documentation project

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Hello everyone!

It’s coming up to the time of year that I have time to work on vintage hardware again. I’m trying to put together a complete reference archive collection of Apple A/UX operating system software, which contains known good installation media images, along with any documentation and tools/utilities that are available.

This thread is for the collaboration of Apple A/UX 3.0.0, 3.0.1, 3.1, and all the way up to anything we don’t even know about. If you have any tech info regarding specific versions, dates released, supported hardware, etc, please comment / post here.

As well, if you happen to have any installation media please reach out to me about imaging it. There is very little found online, and what has been found is often unreliable or corrupt or missing disks. I have some original disks and CDs but at least one of my floppies is corrupt.

I will post a separate thread for other versions, this one is just 3.x.

Thanks in advance for your contributions to this project. Once I have collaborated everything, I will create a set of archive images in a variety of formats to upload to MacintoshGarden.

 

[Paolo B]

Mac SE/30 32Mb on which - just for the fun of it - I recently installed a Fujitsu 640Mb MO drive in place of the internal floppy.
After some trials, I finally managed to get A/UX 3.0.1 (3.1) installed on a 230 Mb cartridge and to have the Mac booting off from it (kind of a “NeXTintosh”…).

Major hurdle was formatting and partitioning the cartridge, as the formatting utility “Apple HD SC Setup” (the A/UX version) is indeed picky and by default it won’t work.

Procedure:

1) Set the MO drive in “direct access” mode (opposite to “removable media”).
2) Use cartridges with 512 Kb block size (128 Mb, 230 Mb or 540 Mb; 640 Mb ones use 2048 Kb block size, so they won’t work).
3) Format the disk from the MacOS environment, using either “Apple HD SC Setup” v7.3.5 (patched version), or “Hard Disk Toolkit” (v 1.8, in my case).
4) Create just one, bootable Mac volume, for example 16 Mb in size, you can leave the rest free.
5) Start the A/UX installer (floppy & CD_ROM).
6) When prompted by the “AUXInstaller”, select “Custom Install” and then “Disk Setup”.
7) Do not “Initialize” the disk again, it’s not necessary and it will fail, so just go to “Partition” > “Custom” and create the necessary partitions (e.g. for the 230 MO disks, I have reserved 16 Mb for the MacOS partition, 120 Mb for the Slice 0, 64 Mb for the slice 1 (swap: my Mac has 32 Mb ram), the rest (some 18 Mb) is not allocated). Note that even though they look alike, the A/UX version of ”Apple HD SC Setup“ is a completely different program and can only run within the Unix environment.
8) Once finished, “Done” and back to the “AUXInstaller”, you can now proceed to Step 3 “Install Software…”

 

[Paolo B]

Now, 230 Mb disks are maybe too small, 540 Mb ones almost impossible to source. 640 Mb would be just perfect, but the block size is a hurdle.
Still, I managed to get them work flawlessly on my NeXT hardware, even to operate as a boot disk (yes, they are much faster and much quieter than the original Canon MO Drive), but any attempt to have A/UX formatting them with a block size of 2048 Kb failed…
Lack of proper formatting tools beyond “Apple HD SC Setup” is surely not helping.
Any idea?

 

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Have you tried FWB’s Hard Disk Toolkit? Probably version 3.x would work best for that use case.

I got A/UX 2.0.1 working off a magneto optical disk using dd on Mac OS X and imaging the CD onto the MO disk, then replacing the disk driver with the one from FWB.

I also imaged the 3.0.1 install CD to both a magneto optical and Iomega Jaz disk using this method and they work as well. I don’t remember if I had to replace the disk driver using FWB or not.

 

[Paolo B]

HDT can format a 640 disk, it transparently adjusts to the 2048 block size. However, once I get to step 6) the disk is seen at 1/4 of the formatted capacity, as the software assumes the block size shall necessarily be 512 Kb. From there on, whatever attempt to do anything with the disk leads to a crash.

I assume the only chance could be to prepare the destination media (format > partition > create the fs) upfront and without resorting to the Apple A/UX utility.

Anyhow, I only have SCSI MO drives, so no way I can connect them to my Mac OSX machine. But maybe I can consider using the NeXT hardware in combination with dd.

I’m no Unix expert, I’d need to deep dive into it…

 

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

HDT can format a 640 disk, it transparently adjusts to the 2048 block size. However, once I get to step 6) the disk is seen at 1/4 of the formatted capacity, as the software assumes the block size shall necessarily be 512 Kb. From there on, whatever attempt to do anything with the disk leads to a crash.

I assume the only chance could be to prepare the destination media (format > partition > create the fs) upfront and without resorting to the Apple A/UX utility.

Anyhow, I only have SCSI MO drives, so no way I can connect them to my Mac OSX machine. But maybe I can consider using the NeXT hardware in combination with dd.

I’m no Unix expert, I’d need to deep dive into it…

Interesting. I have A/UX 3.0.1 working from a 1.3GB MO disk. I’ll have to see how that was accomplished on my end. It’s been a whole year since I’ve even touched it so I can’t quite remember the exact steps I undertook to make that work.