RAM Disk Repair Trick

[luddite]

This may be blindingly obvious to some, but it took me several years to figure it out and I thought I might save someone else the time ;-)

My wife has an LC 575 that she uses for bookkeeping etc. It's a floppy-only model and has had problems with the hard drive for years – problems that required booting from another disk. Unfortunately none of the utilities that would fit on a minimal boot floppy would do the trick (and to be honest, I was just too lazy to dig out a CD drive and go through the hassle of trying to burn a bootable CD), so how I got around it was to set up a 2MB RAM disk (in the Memory Control Panel) and copy Norton to it and then boot from the floppy drive and launch the Norton from the RAM disk.

I thought it was terribly clever!

 

[johnklos]

This may be blindingly obvious to some, but it took me several years to figure it out and I thought I might save someone else the time ;-)
My wife has an LC 575 that she uses for bookkeeping etc. It's a floppy-only model and has had problems with the hard drive for years – problems that required booting from another disk. Unfortunately none of the utilities that would fit on a minimal boot floppy would do the trick (and to be honest, I was just too lazy to dig out a CD drive and go through the hassle of trying to burn a bootable CD), so how I got around it was to set up a 2MB RAM disk (in the Memory Control Panel) and copy Norton to it and then boot from the floppy drive and launch the Norton from the RAM disk.

I thought it was terribly clever!

Yes, indeed. Older Macs were very flexible with their RAM disks. You can even copy an entire System Folder and set the RAM disk to be the boot drive so that you can repair your main boot drive without needing a bootable CD and CD drive.

 

[trag]

Yes, indeed. Older Macs were very flexible with their RAM disks. You can even copy an entire System Folder and set the RAM disk to be the boot drive so that you can repair your main boot drive without needing a bootable CD and CD drive.

Yep. That made my Mac Plus ever so much more useful back in the day. I used something like RAMDisk+ or some such which automated much of the booting and transferring process.

I think the persistence of RAM disk across a system Restart ended with the Beige G3 (Beige lacked that feature).