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Floppy's

Christopher

Well-known member
Quick question. If I get a USB floppy drive, can I use Disk Utility to create System 7 install disks? I already have all the images downloaded. I know I have to turn off Spotlight on the floppy's. But otherwise would it work?

 

Dog Cow

Well-known member
I'm not sure if you can. I don't think that Disk Utility puts on the right boot blocks. That is, you can have a floppy disk with a System 7 System Folder, and it still may not start up a Mac.

What I would try is using the Disk Utility to Restore a disk image of each Install disk onto each floppy disk.

 

paws

Well-known member
I distinctly remember making boot floppies for a Macintosh with the UNIX command "dd" and a USB floppy drive. I don't remember if they worked, however... but I'm quite sure I've never had any luck with Disk Utility.

If you ask me nicely I might try it again later...

 

II2II

Well-known member
If Disk Utility can mount the System 7 floppies, then it should be able to write those disk images to the floppy diskette. Assuming, of course, that your floppy drive is compatible with the OS. (Is this true with OS X?) At least with respect to DiskCopy 4.2 images, the software creates an image of the entire floppy. I'm fairly certain that later versions work in the same way. (Though later versions can handle compression of images, and non-floppy disk images.)

If worse comes to worse and those are Disk Copy 4.2 images, you can strip off the header and copy them to floppy using dd, as Paws suggested.

To my knowledge, there is no such thing as a boot block on a Macintosh floppy diskette. The Mac's firmware is aware of the HFS file system and looks for a special flag on that file system, which says the folder is "blessed" (i.e. it contains the system folder).

 

Aoresteen

Well-known member
To my knowledge, there is no such thing as a boot block on a Macintosh floppy diskette. The Mac's firmware is aware of the HFS file system and looks for a special flag on that file system, which says the folder is "blessed" (i.e. it contains the system folder).
Humm. I'm very hazy here but I think there are boot blocks on an 800k floopy under Sys 6. 1.4mb size under Sys 7.x I don't know.

 
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