Mac XL Disk compatabilty

#1 Wed, 15 Oct 2014 - 00:08 Mac XL Disk compatabilty — #1

Its been far too long since I have owned a Mac XL. I do not recall if the disks are interchangeable with a Mac. That is if I have a floppy formatted for use in a Mac XL, can I put that floppy in a Mac and will it read it (say a 512k with external)?

#1 Sun, 29 Aug 2010 - 05:23 PPCMLA

I think I mentioned it last year, but about a year ago, I got a Lombard/333MHz for about £6.50 on ebay.

Unfortunately, it sometimes crashes and won't normally boot unless it has been unplugged for a while, or if I boot into Open Firmware and type 'mac-boot'.

Sometimes, this error appeared on booting:

http://a.imageshack.us/img141/434/cache.jpg

This hasn't come up for a while, and it hasn't crashed for a while (but the boot problems still occur). Today I ran Gauge Pro and it says that the 512k of L2 cache is disabled.

Any ideas? I have tried just about every combination of PRAM resets, NVRAM resets, PMU resets and OF resets as I can think of.

#2 Wed, 15 Oct 2014 - 02:27 Mac XL Disk compatabilty — #2

As long as it's a 400k disk it will be fine. Formatted on the Mac or XL, it _should_ work either way.

There was an upgrade ROM that let you run an 800k drive in an XL, but chances are low that one is there. If you pop off the front of the Lisa, and there's the newer 800k drive there, then lucky you.

Disks should still be interchangeable between a Mac and an XL.

The XL with Macworks Plus was essentially a big Mac Plus with a 400k drive.

#2 Sun, 29 Aug 2010 - 05:52 PPCMLA

I've just done a little bit of googling, and it appears that the problem could be down to a faulty L2 cache.

#3 Wed, 15 Oct 2014 - 04:12 Mac XL Disk compatabilty — #3

There was some point along the OS line where Macs with built-in floppies lost the ability to write and then read 400k MFS floppies. They kept working with 800k until the bitter end, though. I just ran into that tonight... my Quadra running OS9 wasn't able to read a 400k disk; it wanted to format it. But popping it in an earlier machine running 7.5 read it fine.

This is a decent treatment of the subject:

http://siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.html

#3 Thu, 2 Sep 2010 - 07:36 PPCMLA

Sounds about right. I ran into that problem with a Wallstreet processor module a while back. The cache must have taken a zap from static or something one of the many times I cracked open the machine. Given that it was a 233MHz module with only 512k of cache to begin with, that made it pretty worthless to me. On the bright side, though, Lombards are cheap and plentiful, so you might be able to pick up a 400MHz CPU module for a song if you look around a bit.

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!