Using a Mini Harddrive

If you have a 800K 3 1/2″ disk drive on your Apple II, you have a mini harddrive.  The Apple II is best known for  140K 5 1/4″ diskette drives, although it could be used without one by using a cassette tape machine.  I don’t believe I ‘ve ever met anybody who has used a cassette deck on an apple.

As hard drives go, 800K doesn’t seem like much, but is more than five times the size of of a traditional floppy diskette.  The original profile hard drive for the Apple II was only 5MB (About 36 floppy diskettes).

To save time and make things a little easier, I thought I would set up my mini harddrive using AppleWin.  Once its all set up I can move the image over to my Apple //c and use it from there.  I fire up my Apple //c, my laptop and ADTPro.  I then transferred an image of a 3 1/2″ diskette to my laptop.  The image should use a file extension of .hdv and not .dsk.

I’m going to need some ProDOS based software for my mini harddrive.  I’m going to need some utility programs to set up the disk and move files around, so I’m thinking Apple II System Utilities.  The purpose of this disk is for writing, so I’m going to need a word processor, AppleWorks 3.0 fits the bill.

I got images onto my laptop and loaded up AppleWin.  I loaded up the system utilities disk image and boot the emulator.  After it is booted up, go into configure, on the disk tab and enable the mini harddrive image.  Under Hard Disk Drives check enable and select HDD 1 and OK.  You boot the floppy image first and choose the hard disk after or it will try to boot your hard drive image first, which you have not made bootable.

Now, I want to start with a clean image, so lets format the disk.

You will notice as you go along that Apple System Utilities will you tell you, you have more than 32000 blocks available.  You don’t.  800K diskettes have 1600 blocks.  Hard drives on AppleWin can have up to 32MB.  I read an explanation somewhere, but I can’t remember where, so I’ll come back to that another day.  The image size will stay at 800K until you exceed it.

I choose Format a Disk and slot 7 drive 1 to format my mini harddrive and name it PRODOSWRITER.

Lets make it bootable by copying PRODOS AND BASIC.SYSTEM from the utilities disk.  We might need the system utilities later so make a subdirectory (ASU31) and copy the rest of the system utilities files into it.

Copying AppleWorks is only slightly more difficult because it comes on two diskettes.  Create a subdirectory (aw30), put the AppleWorks Startup (might be called boot) diskette image into drive 1 and copy all the files except PRODOS to the new directory.  When that is done, switch the AppleWorks Startup image to AppleWorks Program and copy all those files to the subdirectory.

So now we should have a bootable mini harddrive, lets try it out.  Reboot AppleWin and it should boot up ProDOS.  Do a catalog and it should list PRODOS, BASIC.SYSTEM, ASU31 and AW30.  Try out AppleWorks with -AW30/APLWORKS.SYSTEM or Apple System Utilities with -ASU31/SYSUTIL.SYSTEM.  If you are happy with the result you can send it back to the Apple II with ADTPro.

I have also created a similar disk for working with ZBASIC,  It has a directory for the 64K version and one for the 128K version