Migrating from SCSI2SD v5.2 to BlueSCSI v2

[Macobyte]

Hello! I have had a SCSI2SD v5.2 in my SE/30 for a couple of years since having it recapped and refurbished. I recently ordered a BlueSCSI v2 with the Pico-W in anticipation of the coming WiFi networking features, and am wondering what the easiest way would be to migrate 1:1 my virtual System 7.5.5 hard drive (with all of my apps and files I’ve amassed over two years) from the SCSI2SD over to a BlueSCSI disk image that I could put on a an SD care and drop into it when it arrives.

In my mind, the easiest way to do it would be to copy everything to a Zip disk, then copy it all back over after the swap, but I don’t have a SCSI Zip drive.

The next thing that came to mind would be to network my SE/30 (which currently has an Asanté MacCon ethernet card installed) to my Pismo and do the copy-swap-copy there. But that seems like a bit of a production.

I’m welcome to suggestions if anyone knows a simpler method I’m overlooking. The “dream solution” would be to pull the SD card out of the SCSI2SD, insert it into my modern Mac, run some script on it which would translate it to the proper disk image, drop it back into an SD card, and then insert it into the BlueSCSI when I install it in the SE/30. Does anyone know if a script or app exists to make this a real option?

Thank you for an insights or advice people are willing to share!

 

[TT/30]

If you can attach them both to the machine simultaneously, you can drag and drop to copy everything over. With emulation like Basilisk, I think you can do the same thing much faster by mounting a blank image that's been initialized. There's probably a way to dd or BalenaEtcher to create an image and BlueSCSI can use that (not sure if it needs massaging or it is good to go as-is).

DD: Using DD to create and write disk images – David and Steve's Blog

 

[Macobyte]

If you can attach them both to the machine simultaneously, you can drag and drop to copy everything over. With emulation like Basilisk, I think you can do the same thing much faster by mounting a blank image that's been initialized. There's probably a way to dd or BalenaEtcher to create an image and BlueSCSI can use that (not sure if it needs massaging or it is good to go as-is).

DD: Using DD to create and write disk images – David and Steve's Blog

Unfortunately they both have internal SCSI interfaces and I don’t have an adapter handy to adapt one to the external SCSI port. Nor do I have an internal SCSI ribbon cable with an extra connector on it.

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

Unfortunately they both have internal SCSI interfaces and I don’t have an adapter handy to adapt one to the external SCSI port. Nor do I have an internal SCSI ribbon cable with an extra connector on it.

Could always buy a supercheap external bluescsi v1 :-/

that might be cheaper than the internal to external adapter..

Could you buy a mutli scsi internal ribbon cable?

i bet you could use terminal to read raw data from the storage device in the correct way so that the raw data is an image for the drive… never worked with scsi2sd but i see it just treats the sd card sectors as a drive…

 

[Patrick]

Oh the blog that @tt-30 linked tells you how you can do it. follow the instructions at

4. Creating your own hard drive / removable drive images (to initialize, edit or just as a backup)​

from that link they provided.

that would prolly work? if not maybe with some modifications it could.

Idk if you can just copy the entire sd card and put it into an image. or if you have to only copy parts of the disk image. DD is powerful, so you can tell it to jump to a specific part and copy only X amount of bytes.

p.s.. i haven't tried this myself so....

 

[Borgmac]

I have been using SCSI2SD cards on PowerMac and BlueSCSI on Macmini M1. You can create a blank disk with DiskJockey. Then you share on the network.

 

[Ubik]

Good answers above. Since I had both an internal and external BlueSCSI V2 here's what I did to move my SE/30 SCSI2SD volume to BlueV2.

Requirements

• BlueSCSI V2 Internal
• BlueSCSI V2 External
• (Optional) PC or Mac with Basilisk II (Basilisk is optional, but makes the process much faster)

Process

• Obtain or create a BlueSCSI V2 compatible blank disk image of the desired size and load it up on the External BlueSCSI V2, naming it appropriately. For example, I named this "HD3 - 711 BlueSCSI.hda" since my external BlueSCSI likes to be on SCSI ID 3
• Connect the external BlueSCSI V2 to the SE/30 and format blank image with HD SC Setup 7.3.5 (Patched)
• On the SE/30 install Retrospect 4.1 Express in System 7.1 + and Duplicate Volume from source SCSI2SD Image to the blank formatted BlueSCSI v2 External volume (this will take a while )
  • Faster Option- In Basilisk II install Retrospect 4.1 Express in System 7.1 + and Duplicate Volume from source SCSI2SD Image to the formatted HDA (this is extremely fast in Basilisk II)
• On your modern computer, copy the HDA image now containing the duplicate volume from your BlueSCSI V2 External SD card to your BlueSCSI V2 Internal SD card, renaming it for the internal SCSI ID (example HD2 - 711 BlueSCSI.hda) and test on the SE/30

 

[TT/30]

The OP just has two internal style drives. But I agree in that I would personally would get a ribbon cable with at least two connectors to plug in both to the same machine. I saw some on ebay that were not that expensive and they are handy to have around. Otherwise, I am pretty sure it can be done by using DD to copy the partition off of the SCSI2SD and mount that in Basilisk and copy over the files or maybe even use that file directly with the BlueSCSI.

 

[reallyrandy]

So I take it there's no real way to extract an image from a SCSI2SD card, edit mmit and put it back?
I couldn't even get a bootable MinivMac image to boot my SE/30. I downloaded the 2GB 6.0.8 image from SavageTaylor, I added software to the image with MinivMac, copied it to the card using balena Etcher on a OS 10.4.6 laptop, then inserted it in the SCSI2SD and… nothing. I had to boot the SE/30 from a Floppy EMU disk, format the SCSI2SD drive with the patched HD SC formatter, write boot blocks with Fedit, then copy over the System folder 6.0.8. Only then would it boot.

 

[Patrick]

So I take it there's no real way to extract an image from a SCSI2SD card, edit mmit and put it back?

there is a real way. but it is a bit of a hack. and would require some work to get it working.

context:
The problem with SCSI2SD is that it doesn't really do disk images. its just raw data right onto the SD card. which you configure start and end bytes for your scsi devices via a java app. (so it knows, say, scsi ID 1 starts at some byte offset, and ends at some later byte offset)

almost all the other scsi SD card solutions out there, (like BlueSCSSI ) do use disk images. so you can just drop disk images on a FAT formatted SD card. an it just works. (its easy to manage in both mini vmac and real hardware)

HOWEVER, it is NOT impossible with SCSI2SD

the hack:

which he goes over this link here. MagicSD

edit: wrong word

 

[davewongillies]

So I take it there's no real way to extract an image from a SCSI2SD card, edit mmit and put it back?
I couldn't even get a bootable MinivMac image to boot my SE/30. I downloaded the 2GB 6.0.8 image from SavageTaylor, I added software to the image with MinivMac, copied it to the card using balena Etcher on a OS 10.4.6 laptop, then inserted it in the SCSI2SD and… nothing. I had to boot the SE/30 from a Floppy EMU disk, format the SCSI2SD drive with the patched HD SC formatter, write boot blocks with Fedit, then copy over the System folder 6.0.8. Only then would it boot.

I haven't tried it yet but this looks like this can read and write to and from the SCSI2SD: https://github.com/j-hoppe/img2sd

 

[reallyrandy]

That's good info Patrick. I didn't realise it worked that way, then again I never researched it either. I have two v5.0x SCSI2SDs but I do prefer BlueSCSI which I also have 2 of. I'm using an internal SCSI2SD for my SE/30. Now that I have it working well I'm just gonna leave it but I'll probably end up selling my 2nd external SCSI2SD. I just bought a SillyTinySCSI for my Mac Plus so that'll be easy to set up like the Blue SCSI I guess. Thanks for the info!

 

[speakers]

...
I’m welcome to suggestions if anyone knows a simpler method I’m overlooking. The “dream solution” would be to pull the SD card out of the SCSI2SD, insert it into my modern Mac, run some script on it which would translate it to the proper disk image, drop it back into an SD card, and then insert it into the BlueSCSI when I install it in the SE/30. Does anyone know if a script or app exists to make this a real option?

Sorry I missed this .. I used to do this regularly. It's a manual process that's straightforward but does require some precision. Here's what you need to do:

1. If you haven't already, get a copy of the SCSI2SD User Manual from https://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/SCSI2SD_UserManual and the scsi2sd-util for a modern Mac (or PC if you must) from http://docs.scsi2sd.com.
2. Hook your SCSI2SD card to your modern machine, run the utility and record the starting sector (block), S, and size, N, of each of the devices (drives) on your SD card.
3. Move the SD card to a modern machine (an SD card dongle my be required) and use Disk Utility to determine the device name for the SD card - let's suppose it's /dev/disk4. Also write-protect the SD card to avoid accidents.
4. For each device/drive on your SD card, use dd from the command line to copy blocks to a disk image file (substituting S and N):
   sudo dd if=/dev/disk4 of=drive.img bs=512 skip=S count=N
5. Copy each image to your BlueSCSI SD using the appropriate filenaming convention. This also applies to using a drive image under an emulator (i use QEMU for both 68K and PPC - see https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/qemu).
6. If you wish to restore an image to the SCSI2SD SD card, the reverse process is:
   sudo dd of=/dev/disk4 if=drive.img bs=512 seek=S count=N

I have dozens of disk images for 68k and PPC systems running assorted versions of Classic MacOS, OSX, A/UX, Linux and NetBSD which I shuffle between SCSI2SD, BlueSCSI, ZuluSCSI, physical hardrives and virtual images.

 

[jimfrob]

Couldn't you just put the BlueSCSI into initiator mode to dump the contents of the SCSI2SD into an image file?

 

[Patrick]

I think thats a new feature. .. and wasn't around when this thread started.

so yes? i think so? i didn't try it.

 

[jimfrob]

I can confirm that dumping the SCSI2SD to the BlueSCSI using Initiator Mode works just fine. I'm doing so right now and am getting 1 MB/s transfer speed.