CD ROM images in System 6

[tanaquil]

I feel like this must be a really stupid question, but I have some old software on CD-ROM images (various kinds, mdf/mds, toast, etc). Was any software ever written that could mount CD images under System 6? Or am I better off burning a physical CD which I could try to run in my external SCSI CD-ROM drive? I'm not even sure the oldest SCSI CD-ROM drives can recognize burned disks.

In a pinch I guess I could drag folders to a zip disk or something (on a bridge mac), but it would be great if the images were useable directly.

I'm curious about using stuff under System 6 because I have a couple of CDs so old that System 7 has trouble reading them properly (it tries to make a bunch of stuff into aliases when they are not). And even if I have the physical CD, I'd like to know that I can make an image work if the physical ever fails.

As I write this, it occurs to me that I could try mounting a disk image in a bridge mac and accessing the bridge mac over the network... not sure if that would fix the weird alias problem.

 

[olePigeon]

Give DiskDup a try.

 

[tanaquil]

I just checked... it looks like only DiskDup+ 2.7 runs under System 6. My copy of DiskDup Pro crashes, as does DiskDup+ 2.9. I think DD 2.7 can only handle floppy-sized images - at least, that's what the documentation suggests.

 

[olePigeon]

Give it a try.

 

[tanaquil]

I tried it - DiskDup+ 2.7 (registered) was unable to recognize any image file made from the CD, even when I re-saved the toast image as a DiskCopy 6.3 file. It also could not make an image from a mounted volume. I was experimenting with this under System 7, since I belatedly realized that I don't have any SCSI hard drives large enough to store a CD image to be read under System 6 (presumably I could get around the latter problem with a SCSI2SD), but as far as I can tell DiskDup+ 2.7 would work the same under System 6 or System 7.

A contemporary copy of DiskDup Pro might theoretically work, but the only copy I have of DiskDup Pro is too recent to run under System 6, and I have no idea where to find an earlier copy of DiskDup Pro now that the original author is impossible to locate (I've tried).

I'm inclined to think that using a mounted image over a network share might be the best way to go, but I haven't yet set up my System 6 machine to see other machines on the network, so I'll have to wait a bit and experiment with that later - I am heading out of town soon.

 

[Gil]

I was under the impression that all the System 6 utilities only supported the older Disk Copy 4.x format, not the newer 6.x format. Which is very unfortunate, since that what almost all of my images are saved as (as well as ShrinkWrap 3.x).

I'd personally pay big money for someone to write a utility to mount DC6.x images on System 6....

 

[olePigeon]

How about using DiskDup Pro (newer version) on a newer Mac just to make the disk image, then see if you can mount it on your System 6 Mac.

 

[ArmorAlley]

There is an extension by the name of CD-Sunrise that is the best mounter of SCSI drives I have ever come across. They are mostly read-only though. I'm not sure if it works with System 6, but it's worth giving it a go.

I remember using a control panel by the name of MountImage. It may only mount floppy images though.

What about ShrinkWrap 2.1 or even earlier?

The name Silverlining (or something like that) comes to mind. Our university used back in the early 1990s to store the abstracts of academic articles on CDs and since there were many CDs, I guess that it made CD images available to us.