More PS/2 upgrades! More RAM, More advanced SCSI!

Posted on September 29, 2023 by neozeed

So I had gotten this Boca Ram/2 card with 2MB of RAM, with space for an additional 6MB. Unfortunately trying to find matching memory has been a lost cause. Since the existing memory is 9 chip modules, I take that to mean it’s parity RAM, so I went shopping for much more available 3 chip modules.

I picked up 2x 1MB modules for £10.

Slotting them carefully into the ram card, taking great care as the clips are plastic!

Now from what I can remember being told is to never ever ever mix memory types like this. But logically I have to think that 9×1 = 4+4+1, right? RIGHT?!

I copied the @7A7A.ADF onto the reference disk image, slotted the card and booted up to the config, and toggled the card to 4M

I didn’t trust the auto-config, plus I just wanted to see what was there. Also I’ve always wondered if the PS/2 model 60 (or 30? 50z?) can slot higher density than the 256kb SIMM’s that IBM had used. I guess one day I’ll give it a shot.

Anyways thinking that this is about done, I save the config and reboot and now It’s Bocaram/2 issues.

Immediately, on reboot I get error 164.

164 POST detected a base memory or extended memory size mismatch error.

1. Run F1 Setup. Check System Summary menu for memory size change.
2. Run the Extended Memory Diagnostic tests.
IBM

Great.

Booting from the reference disk just crashes the PC.

Fantastic.

Pressing F1 however does let you boot, ignoring the issue.

After a bunch of digging I found this zip file with some utils. And just guessing br2pmems ‘fixes’ the CMOS settings allowing the machine to boot normally.

So now it’ll recognize the 5MB of RAM, and just boot normally. GREAT. But booting the reference disk still hangs the machine.

Which then brings me to the next upgrade:

The IBM SCSI with Cache aka the SPOCK. Since I ruined the one SCSI card, and ended up picking up a second card, but this time with the appropriate cable I’ve caused a massive market panic on Microchannel SCSI cards. Seriously check eBay, and you will see that the pricing has collapsed with many now selling in the £20-30 range. You’re welcome!

Not really wanting a 3rd SCSI card, but my eye saw this one with the cache RAM, and I figured if I wanted the ultimate PS/2 of course I’d want a caching controller. This looks to be the first rev of the PCB, but with the ‘hot fixes’ in place from the second rev. While the ROMs are stepping back to 1990, I don’t care much about the 1GB disk limit, as the BlueSCSI can emulate all the available devices in the chain, so I’m not losing anything in the way of capacity. This is a 286 after all.

Since the RAM card screws up the setup program, I have to remove it, and the old SCSI controller, re-configure the system with all the RAM and disks removed first. Then put in the new controller, and re-run setup.

I just accept the defaults, and reboot to check what happened. So far it looks good, slot 8 being near the middle of the PCB, and closer to the disk cage where the blue SCSI rests.

Remembering that the IBM controllers inventory the disks backwards, the 380MB disk image on SCSI ID 6, is the primary boot disk. I didn’t set it to the full 1GB as I want to later see how older versions of DOS/OS2 work with this, and I know they have issues with disks bigger than 512MB, but I figured matching a disk that did exist in 1988 would be more realistic.

With the SCSI setup, I could put the troublesome Boca board back with the RAM, and get my system booting up with the new “faster” SCSI controller, and all that new RAM.

Of course I did a few benchmarks on the old SCSI controller so I would know how much more awesome the new one is.

As you can see this is booted with my normal config.sys with a himem.sys and smartdrv from Windows 3.1 on a MS-DOS 5.1 install.

2,345.8 KB/sec With himem.sys & smartdrv
2,347.5 KB/sec with no himem.sys
2,316.6 KB/sec with runtime xmsmmgr & smartdrv
2,334.0 KB/sec with Windows 3.1 himem.sys no smartdrv

So, with these scores in hand, you can see that the penalty for various XMS memory access being turned on is there, but it’s nowhere near as massive as I’d have thought for performance. Even with it just being there, although again it’s so minimal.

Now for the real shocker:

That’s right, the advanced card is slower. A good 11% slower. Well, that was disappointing. I’m still keeping it in the machine, as having a hardware caching controller was all the rage, just like Mach microkernels. Maybe it’d make more of a difference in a 32bit system, but it’s performance is very underwhelming. For anyone wondering, the WDC AC2340, is an EIDE 340MB hard disk, with a 64kb cache. Im sure it was considered very fancy, and fast for the era, and it’s nice to know that no matter the SCSI controller, the BlueSCSI blows it out of the water. Also keeping in mind that MFM data transfers are usually sub 400KB/sec, so this is much more faster.

Okay you have all this XMS what are you going to do with it?

Well, after I did manage to get this original copy of Word for Windows 1.0, I thought that it would be a good test. One fun thing is that it includes the ‘runtime’ version of Windows 2.11, which can also upgrade an existing install of Windows 2 if detected. Running Windows 2 on MS-DOS 5, does involve loading the setver command in the config.sys, and rebooting. Windows 2 cannot use XMS (more on that) but instead uses the older LIM EMS standard that allows a 64kb page to be viewed from a far larger card. Since the 8086/80286 still use 64kb segments it’s not all that crazy to use.

And that brings me to this great program EMM286!

It allocates a 64kb page in low ROM, and backfills it from XMS. So I give it 3MB, and now I have 1.3MB of XMS left, and 3MB of LIM EMS ready for Windows!

So now I have EMS & XMS! And didn’t have to get some pesky EMS board either. I am pretty sure you need device drivers to use EMS, so how do you use LIM EMS under OS/2 1.x? I have no idea. Probably not I guess?

Anyways I run word, everything is great, it sees extra ram. I exit windows, and unload EMM286, and ..

3.4MB of XMS available? Somehow I lost a megabyte of RAM from Windows 2?! I’m not sure what is going on, or why or how Windows even touched it. Needless to say if you want it back, you need to reboot.

That’s right 494KB free! I thought MS-DOS under OS/2 just used some stubs in real mode, and called back to protected mode. No doubt this is totally wrong, there has to be some weird version of DOS+OS2 that actually runs in real mode going on here. I know that ‘bimodal drivers’ were a thing, but it sure seems like there really is a ‘real mode OS/2’ kernel with MS-DOS tacked onto the side.

Windows 3.0 standard mode, 286 + 5MB of RAM

It’s annoying OS/2 can’t tell you how much ram it sees and what is in use, but at least Windows 3.0 can. It’s more than enough to run Sim City, clearly making this one of the more expensive machines to run the game as intended. With the added RAM it doesn’t thrash as hard, but having emulated disks probably doesn’t matter as much as access time is always zero, and it’ll stream data as fast as it can. You can feel the difference moving between tasks, but things like the OS/2 file manager that loads a view into every directory is still incredibly slow. What were they thinking?!

Thouhts?

Back in the day this would have been an incredibly expensive upgrade. And is it worth it? The machine is still locked at 10Mhz. The FPU is also locked at 10Mhz, and you can feel it. The lightening fast disk access, despite it being some 11% slower is really hard to tell. Does the caching help at all? Applications don’t have to page in/out like crazy before as there is enough RAM to actually run them, but that is where the 10Mhz processor just isn’t there.

Just like the caching SCSI controller, I’m sure we’ve all heard how having that magical EMS memory would help out games like Wing Commander.

XMS/DOS High + EMM286 on the left, and just XMS + DOS High on the right

Well, I had to put them side by side, as I couldn’t believe it, but adding EMS made it noticeably slower. I was *NOT* expecting that. I should add that I used Vegas & this quick tutorial, on how to pan & resize one video to get them side by side. No doubt it’s not perfect but it’s enough to see that once the ship explodes, the performance on the EMS configuration is greatly throttled. It’s moments like this that makes me wonder is this something the caching SCSI card would do better implicitly? Or is it snake oil as well?

3MB is enough to load OS/2, and one application, just as Word v1 or Excel v2/v3 load just fine, but swapping between them is basically unloading one from memory, and loading the other back out to disk. It’s a shame RAM cost so much 1987-1992 as people really could have benefited from it. It’s just utterly bizarre that on such an outrageously expensive system that you even need RAM upgrade cards, it really should have been baked into the main logic board.

Installing the IBM SCSI / A ‘tribble’ card in an IBM PS/2 model 60, using BlueSCSI, and a tale of painful lessons.

Posted on September 17, 2023 by neozeed

As a follow up to Installing a Gotek floppy emulator, this time I’m adding something desperately needed, mass storage using a SCSI card.

The machine is the 40Mb MFM based model, the cheapest option of getting a PS/2 model 60 back in the day. MFM hard disks are incredibly old, and sadly the eventual end point for these old disks is death. While I had investigated a MFM disk emulator they are very costly, with prices starting at $299 USD. Ouch. However, from my Dec Alpha experiments I do have the BlueSCSI was available for a more reasonable £52. So all I would need was a SCSI adapter, and I’d be good to go, right? Mostly.

Looking at the card, you can see that it doesn’t use a standard 50 pin connector. I guess it being the 1980s and IBM trying to re-capture the PC market by going all in with proprietary connectors, they used a 50 pin IDC connector to attach the 50pin SCSI ribbon cable. This would prove to be disastrous for me later on. I initially had no luck finding an original cable, while the SCSI cards themselves seem to be plentiful on eBay. I guess me buying 2 of them has triggered a lot of movement in the market. Another source of concern is that the 286 is 16bit, and the card is advertised as being 32bit, but rest assured the notched middle part seems to indicate that the card is 32bit/16bit compatible. I can attest it works in my PS/2 just fine.

I had decided that since I do have a bunch of jumper cables, I could just solder them directly to the card fingers. I only have one device, so I don’t really need a ribbon cable, the BlueSCSI can emulate multiple devices, so I figured it’d be fine. Of the 50 pins in a SCSI ribbon more than half are ground, so I figured I only needed to solder up about 25 connections, just like how Apple got away with 25 pin connections. I did tone out the pins looking for the +5v power signal, along with checking the common ground, where the flip side of the SCSI card is all ground.

I had connected it up, and the machine saw the blue SCSI, but for some reason it was always reading 25Mb.

I was unable to figure out what was going on, so when I went to inspect my setup, I had seen one of the cables had disconnected. Uh-Oh.

As I pulled the card out of the computer, 3 more cables had popped off, revealing that the fingers were nowhere near as strong as I had thought, and the fingers had been torn off the card. Very sad. The card still ‘works’ but it’d need someone with a good eye and soldering skills to re-attach the pads, or just solder bodge wires from the test points on the card to the IDC connector.

Obviously if I’d known the fingers were so fragile, I’d have not done this. But I was impatient for the IDC connector to arrive (it took about a month), and I really thought I could get away with it. So I don’t know if it matters for anyone else, but yeah it turns out these fingers are nowhere near as strong to side to side forcers as I had thought. Also I was told “on the internet, so you know it’s true”‘ that various super glues are conductive, so test before you think about trying to do it live.

**IBM SCSI Adapter FRU 15F6561 IBM MICROCHANNEL SCSI 32 bit MCA Card + Cable**

And that is when this pair showed up, another SCSI card, but this time with the illusive cable. There is something weird how the universe times things.

So got this card & cable set (If it was available 3 weeks ago, obviously I would have ordered this one as it has the ribbon!).

Not knowing much about the IBM PS/2 SCSI/A adapter, I went ahead in BlueSCSI, and setup a 380MB disk on SCSI ID 0, a 1GB disk on ID1, and a 2GB disk on ID2. That’s when I found out that the adapter initialises the bus backwards.

I had thought it was a weird thing in the setup utility, so I booted up MS-DOS and ran FDISK to reveal that it really does read the ID’s backwards.

Obviously with the BlueSCSI they are just files on a SD card, so it’s trivial to just rename them.

I had also thought it was weird that the reference disk reads the disks being 2GB just fine, so I double up with both data disks being 2GB.

And sure enough, MS-DOS only sees 1GB per bigger disk. After search for a bit, it turns out that the 1GB limitation is a known thing and newer ROMs can work around the issue. Eagle eye’d might have noticed the first adapter had ROMs from 1990, while the second card has ROMs from 1991. But the better ROMs come from a totally different card. Normally I might have been annoyed, but since my disks are virtual I can just give myself 5x1GB data disks, along with that 360MB OS disk.

This is the best part of virtual peripherals, is that you can load out what would have been super expensive, and impractical for being era correct. Instead, now it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience. I can’t imagine trying to use physical disks in 2023.

One of the reasons I kept the smaller ‘C’ drive was to make for installing OSs a bit easier, as many older things hate ‘large’ disks. But being able to connect so many gives so much flexibility.

It’s a shame the MFM hard disk emulators are a bit expensive, even with my screwup it was still cheaper to go with SCSI, and the BlueSCSI basically just works, the only weird behaviour is all on the ‘tribble’ SCSI / A adapter.

Installing Windows XP on a Lenovo S20

Posted on July 15, 2023 by neozeed

This was a silly side project that got out of hand, building an XP physical machine to run some old software. Over in the UK, there is this fantastical store, CeX that sells all kinds of retro crap, often for cheap. Normally I wouldn’t care but with pc titles going from £0.50 to £3 it seemed like some fun 1990’s computing value right there!

I had been slowly amassing a collection of bargain bin, garbage tier games ‘from back in the day’ and while I had been running a few on VMware on Windows 10, with that sub £5 copy of Windows XP home, it sadly didn’t help with so many games being copy protected.

I would need a physical machine, and that is where this hunk of junk the S20 fell into place.

When it comes to Windows XP, the S20 is no slouch. With 12GB of RAM, a Nehalem 3Ghz Xeon W3550 @3Ghz, 2x 120GB SSD drives, and a functional optical disk, this makes for a great system. Rounding out the absurdity is a Nvidia Quadro 4000 with 2GB of VRAM. I’m pretty sure when XP was new I was still using a PII 233Mhz with 256Mb of RAM. So yeah, this is way overkill.

Since all the disks are SATA, the default install CD won’t work. As a matter of fact, not much works on the retail CD-ROM. I tried to use rufus but…

Setup cannot find the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA).

I got this strange error from the USB stick. It appears after some searching it’s seeing the CD-ROM and trying to load the rest of the installer from there. Further searches said don’t use Rufus, instead use “WinSetupFromUSB-1-10“. I figured if I was going to use something like this, that I’d want some crazy pirated/hacked up to date version of XP to compliment the whole hacked up experience, so I went with the seemingly reputable “Windows XP SP3 Integral Edition 2022-6-16“.

Options seemed to be somewhat straightforward, make sure it targets your USB drive! not any external backups. It does recommend you reformat with NTFS & set the alignment for a much needed speed improvement. Other than checking a few boxes to make sure it’s got the BTS driver pack & it’s a 2000/XP/2003 from USB install it pretty much worked.

After rebooting to the USB, be sure to select the

By selecting this option it’ll inject the needed ‘modern’ disk drivers. Otherwise it just wont work (EULA error or inaccessible boot device).

If everything goes well it’ll have injected a tonne of drivers, allowing the install to work.

Once the text part of setup is completed, be sure to boot off the USB again, again choosing option 1 to Auto-detect and use SATA/RAID/SCSI, but then choose option 4 for the Second part of the Windows XP setup.

From here the setup feels very Windows PE. I suspect it is, but it’ll continue basically unattended and on it’s own. From here you can just boot directly from the hard disk, once it’s finished installing. It will prompt for the USB stick again to add all the additional options

I didn’t know what to exclude or pick, So I just chose them all.

It did take about 20 minutes, but at least by the end I did have a very usable XP install.

Trying the first Quadro Driver I could find, and I got knocked down to 640×480 in 4bit colour. It sucked. I don’t know what the deal was.

320.92 is the version that worked for me!

With video working, the next step is all the reaming device drivers. Ohver on Phils Computer Lab, he had mentioned snappy driver installer, but the first link I hit on google was some virus loaded thing. Luckily since this is a fresh install it wasn’t at all painful to shove the USB back in and format the machine. I think I was also spared a lot of damage as it was constantly failing with a “bcrypt.dll missing” error. Saved by being obsolete!

Instead, I found the one on sourceforge.net, and it was working as expected.

Adding the audio drivers took a few attempts at installing stuff, rebooting, trying the windows auto-detect, rebooting, re-running snappy driver, and a few more reboots, and I got the NVIDIA audio and the built in audio working.

One thing is that some games fail entirely on XP. While GTA: Vice City had been running on Windows 10, it fails to do anything on XP. Older games with Win16 setup programs do run but Games like Links LS 1999 fail completely to run. I think the system has both too many cores, too much RAM, and it’s just plain too fast.

With all the talk of abandoning 8086/286/386 modes of operation, I thought it’d be a good time to build a box explicitly for 32bit gaming out of cast aside parts. The Lenovo S20 list price was an eye watering $3,645 USD, and the Quadro 4000 clocking in at $1,199 USD. This was not a casual machine for playing Mahjong Escape: Ancient China. But it’s kind of funny to know it does.

I have to throw some more stuff at it, but one could have only wished for a PC this fast in 2002.

Adding multiple PCnet NIC’s to a Windows NT 4.0 Terminal server under Qemu

Posted on May 5, 2023 by neozeed

So this is probably nothing that exciting for most people, but for me, I wanted to have a Terminal Server onto a DECnet network. Sure I could have probably just done one nice with tun/tap, dumped all the protocols on there, and called it even. But for some reason I wanted 2 NICs to keep the IP on one side, and DECnet on the other.

One thing I wanted was an internal bridge for DECnet only traffic, and since I just need MSRDP access, SLiRP can handle a single TCP port redirect.

The flags are as always pretty simple once you work them out:

qemu -vga std -cpu pentium -m 384 -vnc :0 -net none \
-hda nt4tse.vmdk \
-device pcnet,netdev=slback \
-device pcnet,netdev=decback \
-netdev tap,ifname=tap1,id=decback,script=/root/nt4tse-up,downscript=/root/nt4tse-down \
-netdev user,id=slback,hostfwd=tcp::3389-10.0.2.15:3389 \
-cdrom Windows\ NT\ 4\ All-In-One\ (Workstation\,\ Server\,\ Terminal\,\ Enterprise).iso

And the two network scripts starting with nt4tse-up:

#!/bin/bash
echo starting $1
ip tuntap add mode tap tap1
ifconfig tap1 up
ifconfig tap1
brctl addif decnet0 tap1
brctl show decnet0
echo done with tuntap

And the nt4tse-down:

#!/bin/bash
echo shutting down $1
ifconfig tap1 down
brctl delif decnet0 tap1
brctl show decnet0
ip tuntap del mode tap tap1
echo done shutting down $1

for completeness here is the bridge config in /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml

network:
    ethernets:
        ens3:
            addresses:
            - SOMETHING/24
            gateway4: SOMETHING
            match:
                macaddress: 00:f4:c1:56:40:7e
            nameservers:
                addresses:
                - 1.1.1.1
                - 8.8.8.8
    bridges:
      br0:
        dhcp4: no
        addresses: [192.168.23.1/24]
      decnet0:
        dhcp4: no
    version: 2

This way I have an IP bound bridge for things that talk IP, and a raw bridge, decnet0 that has my non IP decnet stuff on there. Naturally it’ll have my SIMH VAX on there:

# brctl show decnet0
bridge name     bridge id               STP enabled     interfaces
decnet0         8000.aede9f227e7b       no              tap0
                                                        tap1

Also the ability to mount directories as fake fat drives had it’s syntax change as well

 -drive file=fat:rw:win95cd

into something like this:

-drive file=fat:rw:dos,id=fat32,format=raw,if=none -device ide-hd,drive=fat32

A wild Macintosh Plus appears!

Posted on February 19, 2023 by neozeed

1MB Macintosh Plus, with extended keyboard & original mouse. — Mac Plus!

This was rather unexpected, but this auction for a loaded Macintosh Plus had shown up, and it was shipping local, and very cheap for what it was. It included the larger keyboard, original mouse, and an external 20MB hard disk.

Rodime ro652 20mb hard disk — Assembled in Scotland!

Sadly, the hard disk is dead. And not like dead dead, but dead dead dead! After I freed the disk from the external enclosure, and tried to power it on, stand alone, the PSU refused to start as the disk has a hard short in the board somewhere. And I can’t say that I’m all that surprised that a hard disk from 1989 is broken. I’m more surprised that someone was using this in 1989 and didn’t take the plunge and upgrade the machine to the full 4Mb of ram.

Anyways I have this chunk of plastic and glass on a desk, but I can’t do a thing with it. I’ve heard of various SCSI emulators out there, and decided to go with a bluescsi v1 with a DB25 interface as they are generally cheaper, and the Macintosh Plus isn’t exactly all that fast so the effort of the v2 is mostly lost.

bluescsi on the back of the Macintosh Plus — Bluescsi module on the back of the Macintosh Plus

Documentation on the bluescsi is scant, but it seems that a diode needs to be soldered onto the Macintosh Plus motherboard to enable bus power, so you don’t need an external USB power source. I’m a bit worried about opening up this thing as I’ms suspecting the plastics are a log weaker than they look, so I opted for just using a USB cable to power the device.

Anyways let me cut to the chase, I have an 8Gb Micro SD card that I formatted ExFAT (the documentation says Fat32 will work, but I found it might work once, but it’ll definitely never work after a reboot), with a single file emulating a 100Mb hard disk (Luxurious!). I named the file simply ‘HD10_512.hda’ which specifies it’s a hard disk, SCSI ID 1, target 0, 512 bytes/sector and it’s a ‘hda’ image. It’s what the Bluescsi want’s so don’t fight it!

To prepare the virtual hard disk, I used Cockatrice III, since the Macintosh Quadra 800 emulation includes SCSI, which let me create a raw disk image, partition it, and format it under MacOS 8.1. The real trick was installing the operating system.

I first tried MacOS 7.0.1, but it would boot up greeting me with the error that needs more than 1Mb of ram. I tried installing a MacOS 6.0.8 manually, but it crashed saying the system folder was corrupt, and then it just went empty disk mac on further boots.

I’m not sure what the problem was, it’s possible it was the filesystem on the card, or some other issued with the Macintosh, I have no idea.

So I broke down and ordered a pre-installed diskette with MacOS 6.08.

reproduction System 6.0.8 disk — Repurposed System 6.0.8 disk

I booted off the diskette, and amazingly the floppy drive worked! And in about a minute I had booted up, and it saw the hard disk! I dragged the System folder over the hard disk, and rebooted, and yeah it booted right up!

Obviously, the next step will be to get a proper screwdriver to open this thing, figure out how to discharge the CRT so I don’t kill myself, and add some additional RAM. I know it’ll be slow but I do want to see MacMiNT run on this thing! Maybe I’ll find/order the needed diode and make the DB25 bus powered eliminating one cable.

A long long long time ago I did own a Macintosh Plus, with 4Mb of RAM, although I mostly used it as a terminal, since it powered up quickly (it was the mid 90s!) and doesn’t take up that much space, so maybe I can slave it to an ESP32?

**UPDATE

I had been using some generic 8GB microSD card on this, and while it seemed mostly fine on the Macintosh Plus, I had since managed to score a Performa 6400. I had been using this Kingston generic 8GB card, and it had frequent timeouts writing/reading on the Performa. As a matter of fact if the SD card was plugged in at powerup with an ISO image it would crash the Mac.

Kingston SDC10/8GB 015FCT C08G… no good!

I scored this SanDisk Extreme 32GB for Â£15. A bit pricy but it turns out totally worth it!

Â£15 SanDisk Extreme!

Not only does the Performa not crash with an ISO image but it’s pretty darn quick! Well worth the purchase as all my weird issues seemingly just disappear!

So yeah, lesson learned, don’t go cheap on flash.

Server in a can: Unbridled rage

Posted on May 13, 2022 by neozeed

Back nearly a decade ago, Apple was going to release a new Mac Pro. And it was goi to be unlike all the other computers, it was going to be compact, and stylish, a jet engine for the mind.

However instead, we got what everyone would know as the trash can.

big brain idea

So at the time i had this idea that I wanted a Xeon workstation in a nice portable form factor. And this little cylinder seemed to fir the bill. But things changed in my life, i was okay being tied down, and a regular Xeon desktop became my goto machine, a desktop would do just fine.

Then years later, an artist id commish to do some stuff was selling their Mac Pro, as they’d gone all in on Hackintosh, and this was my chance to get one on the cheap. As I’m on a business trip at the moment, I thought this would be a good time to test out what I had envisioned as the future of a personal server in a can.

A long while ago, I’d bought a newer/faster/larger flash for the Mac Pro, and it was a simple matter of hitting the Windows key + R and the machine boots up into an internet recovery mode, and will install OS X Mavericks over the wire. Which sounds great, but this is where the fun begins. Since I ordered. a NVMe M.2 module, it of course is too new for the 2013 machine, so I had to use a shim bridging the Mac’s NVMe SSD port to M.2 for my modern flash. And it never fit exactly right, and I kind of screwed it in incorrectly, but it held in place. Obviously flying bumped things around, as I had kind of figured, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I didn’t take any big peripherals with me, as I figured I’d just get some new stuff, and didn’t worry about it at all. I picked up a View Sonic VX2770 for Â£45, I got this RED5 Gaming keyboard for Â£13, and I already had this Mad Catz 43714 mouse NIB with me. I think I paid $200 HKD or so a year ago, but I like the feel of this style of mouse, and was happy to bring it with me. Little did I know…

So after setting up a desk, and the system, it performed like crap. Worse it was locking up again at random times. I already was using Macs Fan Control to set the fan to 100%, and still it was locking up. I had guessed it’d taken a jostle too many, and I reseated the storage. And then on booting it back up I only got the blinking folder. Great, either it was dying, or I’d just killed it.

A quick jump on Amazon, and I found the “Timetec 512GB MAC SSD NVMe PCIe Gen3x4 3D NAND TLC”, which at a whopping Â£68 seemed like a good idea. And since it was SSD NVMe, it’d just slot into the Mac Pro, and life would be good. Or so I thought.

The first problem I ran into is that I couldn’t boot the mac into either diagnostics, or recovery mode. There is something really weird with a UK keyboard on a non UK machine. I think the 2013 (and probably many more) power up as American, and this is some kind of common issue with non American keyboards. Seriously why is the pipe,backslash on the lower row? Quotes is over 2? It’s a mess. And since I got my Mac Pro in Asia, maybe it defaults to Chinese? Japanese? Who knows?!

Lucky for me, I had this ugly little thing with me for another project. And yeah holding down the ‘Win’+R button got me to recovery mode, with zero issues.

I still have to say, this is pretty cool. However what wasn’t cool, is loading the disk util, and yeah, NO FLASH detected. I have VMWare ESX 7.0 on USB, so booting that up, and yeah it totally sees the drive:

And of course, like an idiot, I installed VMware to at least make sure it’s working.

Yeah it’s booting fine.

By default the Mac Pro seems to be picking up bootable USB devices, so I pop in a Windows 10 MBR USB, and instead I get this:

Bad memory on the GPU? Bad cable? Bad monitor? I have no idea. At this point I’m thinking I’ve totally killed the machine, but a power cycle, and I’m back in ESX in no time. Something is up.

I pull the flash, and I can boot Windows 10 to the installer, but obviously there is no storage to install to. I try adding in a 16GB USB thumb drive, and … It won’t let you install to it. It appears that there is a way to prepare a USB drive for Windows 10 to install, but it’s not exactly something that is easy to do. However Mac OS X, doesn’t suffer this limitation and will let you install to whatever you want, so I install Mavericks to the 16GB drive, and yeah it’s booting. And SUPER slow. The flash still doesn’t show up, so I read the amazon page some more and find this tidbit:

“My Macbook came with Mac OS Capitan as the operating system for recovery, and therefore did not detect the SSD. I had to create a High Sierra installer on a USB using another Mac and an app (DiskMaker) in order to reinstall the operating system from High Sierra. Once this was done, the SSD appeared available and I was able to install the operating system and upgrade without problem.” –Gilberto R. Rojina

Oh, now isnt’ that interesting? So of course I got to update my thumb drive, and of course 16GB isn’t enough space. Great. So I order a Elecife M.2 NVME Enclosure for Â£23, thinking I should be able to figure out once and for all if I can see the old drive, or maybe boot from it. I get the drive, plug in the storage, and Disk Util sees a drive, but will not mount it, nor is it selectable too boot from. The issue of course is that it’s APFS, which I guess cannot boot from external media? I have no idea, but I don’t have anything that critical on there, as I keep my stuff backed up on some cloud thing. So I do have a 128GB thumb drive on me, so I format the 1TB as HFS+, backup the drive, and and once more again reboot to the recovery mode, using the crap keyboard, to install Mavericks onto the 128GB flash. Thinking everything is going to be fine, I find this apple support page, with the needed links to get ‘old’ versions of MacOS.

These versions can be directly downloaded and installed without the store.

Another weird thing is that Mavericks won’t let me login to the Apple store. It notifies me on my phone, I approve it, but it never prompts for the verification. Maybe it’s too old? Anyways I install macOS Sierra, and do the upgrade.

Now running Sierra, I can use the store, and try to take the leap on my USB to Mojave. And of course disappointment strikes again:

You may not install to this volume because the computer is missing a firmware partition.

What the hell?! So now I’m trying to find out how to create a bootable USB installer from the download. That leads me to this fun page at apple. Apparently an ‘install installer to USB drive’ would be too complicated for Apple, so its hidden in a terminal command. Fantastic. Since I’m using that 128GB as my system, I grab that 16GB flash drive, and install the installer to that.

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/SanDisk\ Fit

What an insane path to get this far. The tool will partition and format the drive, and now I can shut down, pop out the 128GB Sierra drive, and boot into the Mojave installer.

I didn’t take pictures, but by default the Mojave installer & DiskTool only show existing partitions. You have to right click on the drive, to expose the entire drive. This was an issue as I’d installed ESX onto the new storage. I clear the drive, and now I can finally install Mojave.

Home run?

Thinking it’s all over, I reboot into the Mac Pro, thinking everything should be fine, I have a properly fitting drive that is super fast, and It’s already 10.14.6 the latest and last version that lets me run 32bit stuff. Except that It’s slow. And unstable. No progress was seemingly made.

Trying to search ‘why is my Macintosh slow’ is, well a total waste of time. And it periodically locks hard making it extremely annoying.

Somehow I found this thread over on Apple support:

I have a quad-core CPU Mac Pro late 2013 (Model Identifier: MacPro6,1). MacOS X 10.9.5.
I have had all sorts of USB devices hooked up to it. At any one time, I usually have all 4 ports filled. I have a 3TB USB 3.0 disk that stores my large files, a USB mouse and keyboard (logitech with a usb mini dongle), a cable to charge my logitech USB cordless mouse, Lightning cable to my iPhone 5, and other things that I rotate in and out, like CF card reader, Audio Box USB audio interface from PreSonus, Sony Webcam, etc.
About 3 months into having the Mac Pro, I noticed that my keyboard went dead in the middle of using it. The mouse was dead too. I blamed the RF dongle that they both share, because the Apple Magic Trackpad (bluetooth) I have still functioned. Try as I might, I couldn't get the keyboard or mouse to work again, so I used the Magic Trackpad to restart the machine, and then my keyboard and mouse worked again.
It wasn't until later that I realized that all the USB busses on the machine had frozen or "died" temporarily. I realized it later because my USB hard drive complained about being "ejected improperly."
Now I have had the USB die on the Mac Pro at least 15 times over the last month and a half. Usually once every two days or so.
I have tried (almost one by one) using some of the USB devices on the mac, and removing others to ascertain if it's a certain USB device that is causing this. But the odd thing is that I never get a message from the OS like "xxx USB device is drawing too much power."
I'm going a little nuts here because I cannot see any rhyme or reason to the USB interface lock ups. And each time it happens, all the USB devices go dead until I restart. Sometimes, I'm able to SSH into the machine from my iPhone and issue a "shutdown -h now" and even though I see the Mac OS X UI shutdown, it never fully halts. I often have to hold the power button to get the machine to turn off.
I really can't say if it's software related, hardware related or what. I've tried to watch my workflow carefully to see if anything seems to make a pattern, but nothing yet.
Any suggestions? Is anyone else seeing behavior like this? Do we think it's a USB device... or is my Mac Pro flakey? -- Cheule

Wait the USB?

And to follow up, this thread over on Apple, that mentions:

"When I plugged in the same config on my new machine USB 3.0 directly it was very weird, devices would not remount and only show up if they were then when present at startup, and thruput was sluggish.  So I stopped using the in built USB 3.0 and grabbe the old belkin thunderbolt USB hub, and BAM it all works perfectly.  Better than that after testing the throuput , the belkin gave me 30-50% better performance that the inbuilt USB, that is without any hubs just direct." -- symonty Gresham

And sure enough another search about the USB setup seems to confirm it from Anandtech

Here we really get to see how much of a mess Intelâ€™s workstation chipset lineup is: the C600/X79 PCH doesnâ€™t natively support USB 3.0. Thatâ€™s right, itâ€™s nearly 2014 and Intel is shipping a flagship platform without USB 3.0 support. The 8th PCIe lane off of the PCH is used by a Fresco Logic USB 3.0 controller. I believe itâ€™s the FL1100, which is a PCIe 2.0 to 4-port USB 3.0 controller.

Unreal. I notice as I try to use the machine more occasionally the mouse turns itself off. Replugging the mouse shows it powering up and immediately powering off. I turn on the annoying backlight of the keyboard, and yeah it powers down too, however reinserting it brings it back to life. Luckily I still have this A1296 Apple Wireless Magic Mouse with me, so I pair that and unplug the mouse, and everything else USB.

Mad Catz, the Mac KILLER — This mouse killed my Mac Pro

It was the mouse. I can’t believe it either. I am simply blown away how this could possibly be a thing. I haven’t ordered the thunderbolt to USB dock yet, as I really didn’t want to spend any money on this thing, it was a grab and go solution, that has proven itself not so much grab and go.

Finally getting somewhere

After 6 hours of working yesterday, I shut it down to give it a break for a few hours, and it’s been up some 12 hours so far, pain free. In 2022, the Xeon E5v2 processor just really isn’t worth lugging around, but I already had it, so when it comes to transport, it actually works out pretty well. I wonder if this would have been a good traveling solution 2013 onward, but the fact a mouse could basically bring the machine down makes me think I’d have gone totally insane trying this on the road. Just as the USB Win/Alt/Alt GR/FN keys not being able to trigger the recovery mode was also crazy.

I don’t know why Apple insists on such fragile machines, but maybe the new Arm stuff is better? I can’t justify one at the moment.

Updates in the field

I’m working on getting some local retro kit, and I’ll have more fun coming up. But this fun experience ate 4 days of my life, and the least I could do is document it. I don’t know if it’ll help anyone in the future, maybe once these become iconic collectable, like the Mac Cube. Although as a former cube owner, those at least didn’t freak out when you used a 3rd party mouse.

Manually migrating NT 4.0 on VMware ESX to Hyper-V or what is a ‘flat’ vmdk anyways?

Posted on February 24, 2022 by neozeed

So due to recent economic events I’m having to consolidate all my VM’s back to the office I’m currently renting. I had a fancy 1gig internet connection installed and I’m still under contract for a year. Before the c00f it made sense as I did a lot out of that office and was getting ready to do something fun and big. I had planned on making a cloud service, I’d bought a bunch of Xeon boards, and started the initial build of my cloud to shop around but then the world ended the following weekend. As they say, bad timing.

So as a fan of old junk I still have some NT 4.0 stuff, and it’d been running on VMware for years, no issues everything being great. But I need to do double+ duty at the moment and to make it easier than trying to get GPU passthru working, I’m just going with Hyper-V on the Windows 10 desktops that I have running. May as well make people doubly useful!

In some idea of ‘performance’ I had converted all the virtual disks to ‘flat’ VMDK’s and never thought twice about it as it worked, and all was well.

Naturally to start with I uninstall VMware Tools while running under ESXi and shut down the VMs.

Well after rsync‘ing my disks back, I converted them with qemu-img and got this weird error that my VMDK’s were not VMDK’s. They are infact FLAT disk images. With really screwed up geometry that prevented both qemu and Hyper-V from mounting the raw converted disk images.

So first let’s verify the data:

root@NT15:/mnt/d/virtual/USENET-AltaVista# sfdisk -d USENET-AltaVista-flat.vmdk
label: dos
label-id: 0x8058e639
device: USENET-AltaVista-flat.vmdk
unit: sectors

USENET-AltaVista-flat.vmdk1 : start=          63, size=     4096512, type=7, bootable

And sure enough yeah it’s like a typical DOS disk with the start 63 sectors in. So to mount this under Linux (WSLv2 too!) we need to tell the loop driver the offsets, which is the start and size * 512 or:

# mount -o loop,offset=32256,sizelimit=2097414144 USENET-AltaVista-flat.vmdk /mnt

And all is good. Yes even a type 7 for HPFS/NTFS it mounted find and the data is there.

Now the ‘fix’ was an old one from back in the day, when moving stuff around and things get goofed you can try to xcopy and permissions always get messed up or cheat, and just use another NT installation and format a floppy disk and copy the following system files to it:

ntldr
ntdetect.com
boot.ini

In my case that’s all I needed to do, I re-ran qemu-img to convert from raw to vpc disk images:

qemu-img convert -f raw -O vpc USENET-AltaVista-flat.vmdk USENET-AltaVista-flat.vhd

And setup Hyper-V to boot my virtual diskette first, and in no time my NT was back up and running.

Naturally be sure to install the legacy network adapter for the VM, and re-configure NT for the DECchip 21140 adapter.

Dont’ forget to re-run service pack 6, and the update. Since these disks & VMs were pre-installed I didn’t have to mess with the “CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled” flag. Although that was quite the fun adventure at the time.

In my case there was some IP addresses to change, but it’s back online with minimal effort which is always fine. Hyper-V doesn’t have any real integration stuff for old Windows so it’s pretty much a set it an forget it thing, or use Terminal Server for remote access.

So yes, many of the hosted things I have are down. I know. Yes it sucks. And yes I think the disk I put this on at the moment kind of sucks too. It’s been super cold here lately and I didn’t want to be exposed out there riding around getting soaked in the high winds so I’ll keep shuffling stuff later. But for now I got to save some hosting fees. And things like the gopher are dead. for the moment.

Aaru 5.3LTS Launch Party

Posted on September 27, 2021 by neozeed

Claunia‘s Aaru project is hitting a 5.3 milestone, and having a launch party!

Aaru is a fully featured media dump management solution. You usually know media dumps as disc images, disk images, tape images, etc.

With Aaru you can identify a media dump, extract files from it (for supported filesystems), compare two of them, create them from real media using the appropriate drive, create a sidecar metadata with information about the media dump, and a lot of other features that commonly would require you to use separate applications.

On trying to extract files from a Texas Instruments S1500

Posted on September 14, 2021 by neozeed

So this started out as a weird thing that killed a day for me. I thought it was a little fun to look at but, ultimately I proved that I could extract files, but not from the requested image.

So let’s get into some more details, my failure, and well it’s been raised into another chance for some luck/fast knowledgeable hacker to get a payout to extract a single file.

As mentioned above the computer is the Texas Instruments S1500, the disk image was dumped on bitsavers years ago as s1505_cp3540/s1505_cp3540.dd.gz. As you may guess it’s a raw ‘dd’ of a disk.

Now looking at a few sources namely unix-ag the OS in question is TI System V, an AT&T SVR3.2 derivate. Running strings does reveal ‘SysVr3TCPID’ And this appears to be the Unix Version Banner:

(c)Copyright 1993 Hewlett-Packard Company,  All Rights Reserved.
(c)Copyright 1986-1992 Texas Instruments Incorporated,  All Rights Reserved.
(c)Copyright 1984-1988 AT&T, All Rights Reserved.
(c)Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1985-1990 The Regents of the Univ. of California
(c)Copyright 1980, 1984, 1986 Unix System Laboratories, Inc.
(c)Copyright 1990 Motorola, Inc.
(c)Copyright 1989-1990 The Santa Cruz Operation. All Rights Reserved.
                         RESTRICTED RIGHTS LEGEND
Use, duplication, or disclosure by the U.S. Government is subject to
restrictions as set forth in sub-paragraph (c)(1)(ii) of the Rights in
Technical Data and Computer Software clause in DFARS 252.227-7013.
                         Hewlett-Packard Company
                         3000 Hanover Street
                         Palo Alto, CA 94304 U.S.A.
Rights for non-DOD U.S. Government Departments and Agencies are as set
forth in FAR 52.227-19(c)(1,2).

Along with further extraneous info like:

TI Sys V
V/68-1.0
3.3.2
MC680X0
Hewlett-Packard 9000 Series 1500

Fantastic. Well digging around you’ll eventually find that SYSV filesystems have a magic number, and it’s 0xfd187320

So a simple search through the raw filesystem reveals some:

neozeed@remlazar:/mnt/c/temp$ xxd s1505_cp3540.dd | grep 'fd18 7e20 0000 0002'
0035b7f0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 fd18 7e20 0000 0002  ..........~ ....
00f5b7f0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 fd18 7e20 0000 0002  ..........~ ....
02f5bff0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 fd18 7e20 0000 0002  ..........~ ....
04cc0bf0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 fd18 7e20 0000 0002  ..........~ ....
0505bff0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 fd18 7e20 0000 0002  ..........~ ....
1f1267f0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 fd18 7e20 0000 0002  ..........~ ....

And this fits the bill, as the next 32bit ‘word’ is the version, in this case 2 to indicate 1024k blocks ,and improvement added to SYSVr2. One thing is that the struct to read a super block is 512bytes (or is it always?), and the magic number is near the end, so from the above offsets, subtract 496 (decimal!) and you can get the start and sizes of each filesystem. Fantastic!

Speaking of SYSVr2, Do you know what is another SYSVr2? A/UX.

Shoebill was panned for not emulating the full Macintosh, rather it reads the kernel directly from the filesystem, and boots into it. That means Shoebill can read UFS/SYSV. Great start?

So I took the filesystem code from Shoebill, hacked it enough to let me build on Visual Studio, and point it to a raw filesystem and take a look. I put it here: filesystem.c

Now I’m impatient so it still needs a legit Apple A/UX virtual disk. Granted we don’t need it, but it made it easier to let the existing code fiddle with apple partitions, but when it comes time to read SYSV blocks, I closed the file handle and swapped things around. And that lead to this:

As you can see there is a LOT of zeros. However the magic & type align.

Meanwhile here is what an A/UX SYSV filesystem looks like. Notice far less zeros.

Additionally I was able to get another 68k based SYSV Unix disk, and yeah not all zeros. Also yes, using the Shoebill code it extracted files just fine.

However using my approach on the filesytem I always only get a directory with 2 enteries the ‘. ..’. I modified the source to just count inodes and write them to disk. And use inode 2 is just a tiny file. No doubt with all the zeros the disk is either very corrupted (backup superblocks?! where?! how?!) or the kernel implicitly knows these things, or finds them somewhere else.

I’ve been authorized to give a bounty of $200 USD to be able to extract arbitrary files from the 1505 disk image. I thought I’d give it a shot, but I don’t get how the super block aligns but the data doesn’t. Unless there is some other insane padding thing for a 1k superblock? The more I think about it, it’s probably likely as I know at some point I was skipping 3 blocks from an offset to get to a superblock, and 3 is just a weird number. 1 block header, 2 block superblock makes more sense.

Additionally this table may prove useful, especially for the ‘skip 3’ or pad to 1k:

Tape and disk utility is in progress...

26 partitions, 12-longword descriptors:
     Name    Start    Length   User  Comments
1  * LABL vl 0        2        FFFF
2  * PTBL pt 2        3        FFFF
3    SAVE sb 5        3        FFFF
4    FMT  fp 8        9        FFFF
5    TZON tz 17       296      FFFF
6  * unx1 lb 313      1024     0002  TI Sys V 3.3.2
7  * unx1 lb 313      1024     000A  TI Sys V 3.3.2
8  * unx1 lb 313      1024     0013  TI Sys V 3.3.2
9  * unx1 lb 313      1024     0014  TI Sys V 3.3.2
10   unx2 lb 1337     1024     0002  TI Sys V 3.3.2
11   unx2 lb 1337     1024     000A  TI Sys V 3.3.2
12   unx2 lb 1337     1024     0013  TI Sys V 3.3.2
13   unx2 lb 1337     1024     0014  TI Sys V 3.3.2
14   unx3 lb 2361     1024     0002  TI Sys V 3.3.2
15   unx3 lb 2361     1024     000A  TI Sys V 3.3.2
16   unx3 lb 2361     1024     0013  TI Sys V 3.3.2
17   unx3 lb 2361     1024     0014  TI Sys V 3.3.2
18 * cfg1 cb 3385     17       FFFF  TI Sys V 3.3.2
19   cfg2 cb 3402     17       FFFF  TI Sys V 3.3.2
20   cfg3 cb 3419     17       FFFF  TI Sys V 3.3.2
21 * root fb 3436     12288    FC02  TI Sys V 3.3.2
22   usr  fb 15724    32768    FC02  TI Sys V 3.3.2
23   jdis an 48492    2        FFFF  multi-volume file system anchor
24   pipe fb 48494    1024     FC02  pipe file system partition
25 * swap pb 49518    32768    0002
26   prt1 fb 82286    448972   FC02  part of jdis multi-volume

Did you know there is almost nothing left to document that this poor machine even existed?

Seriously look for “TI System V”

Heck even on the UTZOO archives..

AltaVista UTZOO search (superglobalmegacorp.com)

It’s like 5 posts, 3 being the same, someone who couldn’t dial out, and someone on the old UUCP map! Save me!

HFS Utillities

Posted on November 16, 2020 by neozeed

I got a question the other day about how to easily move files in and out of Cockatrice III, especially since as part of my ‘try to make it stable by cutting features out’ approach I removed the ability to mount foreign directories under Basilisk II.

For my personal use, I have an AppleTalk LAN, and I just use a Windows NT 4.0 server with AppleTalk, as a file server/proxy and that works pretty good for me, so much so that I didn’t even think of any other way of doing this.

One of the quickest and easiest is HFV Explorer, however the ‘catch’ being it doesn’t read SCSI disk images (aka things with partition maps). But for the ‘massive floppy’ images it’s more than fine.

HFSUtils is another approach, it’s like the old ‘MS-DOS utils’ of ancient Unix days, allowing you to ‘mount’ a disk image, and copy files in and out. I thought I’d give this a spin to copy Marathon into my virtual OS 8.1 image. It’s pretty straight forward first ‘mount’ the disk image:

C:\Cockatrice>hmount.exe scsi0.dsk
C:\Cockatrice/scsi0.dsk: contains 1 HFS partition
Volume name is "SCSI0"
Volume was created on Sat May 19 14:04:04 2018
Volume was last modified on Mon Nov 16 14:59:02 2020
Volume has 1056545280 bytes free

Now make a directory:

C:\Cockatrice>hmkdir scsi0:xfer:

And then copy in the file:

C:\Cockatrice>hcopy marathon.sit scsi0:xfer:

C:\Cockatrice>hdir scsi0:xfer:
f  ????/UNIX         0   5627676 Nov 16 15:34 scsi0:xfer:

C:\Cockatrice>

And just like that it’s there!

And yes it unstuffs!

And just like that we have downloaded a game from the garden, copied it into a virtual SCSI disk, and gotten it to run, from the painful CLI.

Wasn’t that great!?

Virtually Fun

Fun with Virtualization

Category Archives: hard disks