A/UX Version 1.0

Before attempting this procedure, you should verify that your hardware is compatible with A/UX 1.0 - A/UX bypasses the Macintosh Toolbox, and communicates directly with the hardware, so if your Mac is not on the compatibility list, you're out of luck. This also rules out any of the current Macintosh emulators - Unless your emulator accurately replicates the low-level functions of the PMMU, FPU, and SWIM chips, it will not work.

Produced in 1988, the first version of A/UX will only run on the Macintosh II, and requires the installation of a 68851 PMMU (paged memory management unit). Unisoft performed much of the initial development, porting SysV Unix to the Macintosh platform, and gradually handing the project off to Apple engineers. The first version was distributed on floppies, QIC tape, or pre-installed on an 80MB hard drive... I have not been able to confirm, but I believe the cd-rom product was not produced until version 1.1.1

So, step #1 is to find a copy of the software... Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of A/UX 1.0, nor have I ever seen one. However, I have seen several copies of A/UX 1.1.1 over the years... Back in 2004, Peter Bartoli of slagheap.net purchased a beta release of A/UX 1.1.1 on cd-rom. The auction did not include the setup floppies, so we were unable to perform a proper installation... but we did eventually get it to work by dumping the installation CD to a hard drive:

root@seven~# dd if=/home/scott/aux-1.1.1-vcfa.iso of=/dev/sdb

I should point out that I do not have a copy of Peter's A/UX 1.1.1 beta - being an Apple-internal release, distribution of this version would be illegal... and tracing it would be trivial. I have a copy of A/UX 1.1.1 that I found on the internet - As far as I can tell, it is the final release. I also found a copy of the A/UX 1.1.1 SASH (stand alone shell) floppy, which contains some of the Macintosh startup files... but I still don't have the actual installation floppy.

Using the Unix dd command, you can dump the entire A/UX 1.1.1 installation disk to a hard drive - This gives you a bootable "installation" of the operating system. However, there are drawbacks to this method. Since the dd command does a sector-level copy, the target drive ends up being the same size as the source. This temporarily turns your 1.0GB hard drive into an 80MB. Clearly, a more elegant solution is required... Start by building an A/UX 3.0 system. We're going to use it to build a partition table.

Connect an external hard drive to your A/UX 3.0 system, and boot into A/UX - Use the Apple HD SC partitioning utility to partition the drive. Make a note of the partition sizes... You will need this info shortly

The earliest version of A/UX used the SVFS (5.2) filesystem - By default, the A/UX 3.0 kernel does not include SVFS support. Rebuild your kernel with SVFS support using:

Next, we need to create the root filesystem where A/UX 1.1.1 will reside. You can do this using the mkfs command - just feed it the slice number, and the sector-count. In the example below, I am creating a 73,362KB (146,725 sector) filesystem on slice zero of SCSI ID 1:

We need to mount the new filesystem on /mnt, and the A/UX 1.1.1 cd-rom on /cdrom. (You need to create the /cdrom directory first)

Now for the fun part... We're going to copy the Unix hierarchy from the A/UX cd-rom to the external hard drive. This will take a while:

If all went according to plan, you should now have a full installation of A/UX 1.1.1 on the Unix partition of your external drive. Copy the MacOS files from the cd-rom to the MacOS partition of the external drive... This will make your drive bootable.

Shut everything down, and set the external drive to SCSI ID 0. Connect it to your Macintosh II (if you have a PMMU), IIx, IIcx, or IIci... Fire it up, and double-click the SASH utility.

You should boot up to single-user mode...

Modify the /etc/inittab... Change the default runlevel (initdefault) to 2 or 3