Hi, I have had a NextStation Color 25MHz for many years and the hard drive finally died. I purchased a RaizinMonster and a 4 GB compact flash card. I was getting ready to install NextStep but now I find that my floppy drive is dead and I can't find a CD-rom drive of the correct vintage.
Before I go on an eBay shopping spree, is there any way that I can put an image directly on the compact flash card?
Many thanks.
Yes, you should be able to DD the image directly to the card on a linux or OS X PC. There is also a version of DD for windows you can download.
Quote from: "hawkman"Hi, I have had a NextStation Color 25MHz for many years and the hard drive finally died. I purchased a RaizinMonster and a 4 GB compact flash card. I was getting ready to install NextStep but now I find that my floppy drive is dead and I can't find a CD-rom drive of the correct vintage.
Before I go on an eBay shopping spree, is there any way that I can put an image directly on the compact flash card?
Many thanks.
hello : I have used NeXT floppy drives working for $10 or new old stock floppy drives for $19.95 also if you don't have an external cd rom you can use a power splitter and multi connector 50 SCSI cable to connect to a SCSI cd rom , I have some working ones tested compatible for $50 and would throw in a power splitter and internal cable to get you up and running as a plan B for you.
Thanks for the info. I have a Mac so dd is available to me. Where can I download the image file from?
Google: "nextstep 3.3 image" or something similar.
BTW, I would analyze why the floppy failed. Maybe the capacitors on the mainboard are leaking which might soon ruin the whole machine.
I've done some intense Googling and the best I've found is here:
http://vetusware.com/download/NeXTSTEP%203.3%20HD%20Image%20with%20Previous%203.3/?id=10456It's a sketchy looking site but the file downloads and unzips to be a 2 GB ".dd" file along with what appears to be a Windows emulator and some ROM files. I'm only interested in the DD file.
Any tips before I do some trial and error?
Update on progress.
I downloaded that file, extracted it and put it on the CF card using these commands on my Mac:
sh-3.2# diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk7
sh-3.2# dd if=/dev/disk7 of=NS33_2GB.dd bs=64k
61306+1 records in
61306+1 records out
4017807360 bytes transferred in 612.880765 secs (6555610 bytes/sec)
I then put the card in the reader, in the NeXTStation and booted to ROM monitor and set the boot to be "sd".
However when I boot from the ROM monitor, the light on the CF-SCSI adaptor flashes a little then I get:
booting SCSI target 1, lun 0
Bad version 0x33c08ed0
Bad version 0x0
Bad version 0x0
Bad version 0x0
Bad label
NeXT>
Any ideas?
I suspect something is wrong with writing the image to the CF. It usually takes much longer than 10minutes.
I think what you want is:
dd if=NS33_2GB.dd of=/dev/rdisk7 bs=512k
looks like you wrote a blank 4GB output to the NS33_2GB.dd file the way you have it now, so make sure you use a new copy of the disk image.
That's pretty funny... yup, I did exactly what you said - I got my input and output files mixed up. Thanks.
Re-dd'ing now...
HOLY COW - that worked!
sh-3.2# diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk6
Unmount of all volumes on disk6 was successful
sh-3.2# dd if=NS33_2GB.dd of=/dev/rdisk6 bs=512k
3839+1 records in
3839+1 records out
2012774400 bytes transferred in 78.120462 secs (25765009 bytes/sec)
And it was fast!
Now I just need to figure out how to get the Y2K patches installed and a DHCP client working without floppies... but I have a NeXT GUI for the first time in years on my machine!
Thanks everyone.