Disk image creator doesn't work.

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osx-lover
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Disk image creator doesn't work.

Post by osx-lover »

Hi,

I'm on the Windows version of SheepShaver and have noticed that whenever I create a disk image for MacOS, the file always has nothing in it. It doesn't actually "create" a blank disk image file. It just creates a file with absolutely nothing in it. Could you please help?

EDIT: I just found out that if you set the size to "2048," it won't work, but if you set it to "2000," it will.
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adespoton
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Re: Disk image creator doesn't work.

Post by adespoton »

osx-lover wrote: Wed Feb 14, 2024 9:49 pm Hi,

I'm on the Windows version of SheepShaver and have noticed that whenever I create a disk image for MacOS, the file always has nothing in it. It doesn't actually "create" a blank disk image file. It just creates a file with absolutely nothing in it. Could you please help?

EDIT: I just found out that if you set the size to "2048," it won't work, but if you set it to "2000," it will.
Interesting bug; I've always created blanks by creating a file of the size I want filled with zeroes, and then let SheepShaver format it. I thought that that's what the UI was doing as well.

Do larger/smaller disks work? Eg, 4196 or 4000, and 1024 or 1000?

Which guest OS are you running? 9.0.4?
osx-lover
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Re: Disk image creator doesn't work.

Post by osx-lover »

Now this is really interesting.

When I try 4196, the disk only has 100 MB, but when I try 4000, it has none. Also, when I try 1000 or 1024, those sizes seem to work. So it must be some sort of arbitrary limit.

Also, I should bring something up. When I try to install Mac OS 9.0.4, it's really slow. It gets stuck on the hard disk drivers step for a while. This might just be a Windows thing. I don't know.
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adespoton
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Re: Disk image creator doesn't work.

Post by adespoton »

osx-lover wrote: Thu Feb 15, 2024 6:25 pm Now this is really interesting.

When I try 4196, the disk only has 100 MB, but when I try 4000, it has none. Also, when I try 1000 or 1024, those sizes seem to work. So it must be some sort of arbitrary limit.

Also, I should bring something up. When I try to install Mac OS 9.0.4, it's really slow. It gets stuck on the hard disk drivers step for a while. This might just be a Windows thing. I don't know.
Looks like there's a ceiling of 2047 for the disk size then. Odd, as SheepShaver will definitely (depending on the guest OS) handle larger disk images. ANY file can become a disk image; SheepShaver will just take the file, see it can't read it, offer to format it, and then overwrite the contents of the file with an HFS+ partition of the same size.

As for the disk drivers step, this is a known and documented issue; SheepShaver doesn't actually emulate disk volumes; it just mounts partitions. Therefore, there's nowhere for the disk drivers to get written to. You can usually turn off installing disk drivers in the setup process, which gets around that issue.
osx-lover
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Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2022 8:10 pm

Re: Disk image creator doesn't work.

Post by osx-lover »

Thank you for that last tip. I'll just create my images with 2000 megs from now on and remember to turn off that step.
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