Custom SASI HDD image

[BlackVega]

Here's the deal- I'm looking to create a proper SASI HDD image that can boot Human68k system and run some drivers and diagnostic software and some small games, somewhat like incrediblehark's SXSI HDD but for SASI machines so these early SASI machines can boot it directly right out of the box. ArdSCSIno can boot SASI images using this protocol btw. There is a limitation of 40MB maximum tho. There is 1 thing I want to recreate but I have no idea how- Human68k system has to read FDD drives 0 and 1 and otherwise it refuses to boot unfortunately so technically FDD drives need to be connected even though the system boots from HDD which sounds crazy and very limiting to me. However there is a hack in the SXSI HDD image where there is a free 2MB partition that acts like a hack so that image can boot without FDD drives present or something along these lines. How do you apply the same hack for a custom SASI HDD image? This is the only thing I have absolutely no idea how to achieve but I believe I can do the rest like filling the HDD with programs and drivers and so on. Please help. Thanks

UPDATE: link to the image:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13F_iCj9OMuhK8PherqYWMolGYimlPxlg/view?usp=sharing

[incrediblehark]

I'll give a quick rundown and if you need more help let me know and I'll run through it with some screenshots.

1. The easiest way for me to make a SASI image is using XM6-Pro 68k - Theres an option in the menu to created a fixed SASI disk. Use that option and make one thats 40MB total in size.

2. Boot into Human68k and run format, making 1 38MB partition as your system and then another 2mb empty partition as your last one.

3. remove disk and reboot machine with your newly made image, or move files to it via editdisk or other means.

[BlackVega]

Ah, I went ahead and read some stuff about it and apparently it's even easier than I thought. Apparently Human68k needs at least 2 drives to boot up so the hack is pretty easy for that- you create a 2nd partition and there you go. I went ahead and created a 40MB SASI image which is the limit for this standard, created 2 partitions and copied all tools from MasterDiskV3 and here you go. This image boots using a real ArdSCSIno on a X68000 without any floppy drives (as well as with floppy drives). It boots up right away, no SXSI driver or anything else required, just a working system. On-board SRAM battery is not needed. It can be dead (but please remove it as soon as possible nonetheless) or non existent. You can run switch.x or any other diagnostic tools straight away which is tremendously helpful for system troubleshooting. If anyone is interested you can get it here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13F_iCj9OMuhK8PherqYWMolGYimlPxlg/view?usp=sharing

More tools and software may be added in the future. As far as I can tell ArdSCSIno is the only open source project that can run real SASI images using the real old protocol. Apparently it can also run SCSI files as the name suggests but I haven't tested that functionality yet. In case you use ArdSCSIno then the file needs to be named HD00_256.HDF and you need to configure a proper "scsi-config.txt" file on the SD card. You can read more about it on the web but if anyone is in the need I can give detailed instructions

[incrediblehark]

Nice work! I made one of these a while back for people without working floppies to use so they could load up the sxsi drivers before installing my image. I never got any feedback from it so hopefully yours gets a lot more use than mine did!