Using Bootable Floppy Disk Images from the Internet to make Actual Floppy Disks

I’ve recently made some interesting discoveries that I thought may be valuable to other fans of the early Apple Macintosh Computers.

I had an interesting conversation about running some old Macintosh software that was pre System 6.  This era of Mac was before my time and so an interesting challenge.  Of all the early Mac system software disks out there, I think the best organized collection is currently on Winworld, here.  These files work great with the vMac Mini emulator running on a modern Mac, but when you move the files back onto a “Rosetta Stone” Mac in order to build boot floppies, the files are not associated with Disk Copy (the resource fork is missing, and Disk Copy does not recognize the files as disk images).

In the past, I have had some limited success in finding StuffIt (SIT) archives and bringing them onto the bridge machine before un compressing them, that way if the resource fork was intact it will be maintained, but unfortunately a lot of the files on Winworld are missing that information.  Up to this point I had been deleting these versions of the files and moving on to try to locate different sources of the files.

Today I learned that there is another good option.  The vMac Mini folks have created a set of utilities that can be used on OS9 and early versions of OSX to recreate the resource fork for a disk image if that information is missing.  The part of the tool that’s most relevant to vMac Mini is used to indicate that the file should be opened in vMac Mini, but they also created a tool too associate files with Disk Copy.  This utility is called SetFType and is avaliable here.

Normally I used OS 8 or OS 7 for disk imaging activities, but unfortunately this utility requires OS9, so the process I used was this:

Put the files I wanted to use on ZIP drive using the modern Mac, 

Boot my Bridge Mac up in OS9

Run the SetFType utility on the files on the Zip drive

Reboot to OS8 and copy the files over onto the Bridge Mac

Create Floppies using Disk Copy 6.3

Using this technique, I’ve been able to create boot floppies for System 3, the earliest version that will boot on the Macintosh Plus, and to get my Macintosh Plus running System 4, which is the earliest version that will support large 2GB SCSI partitions.

Other than running some very old versions of software that will crash on System 6, I’m not sure how much use I’ll get out of System 4, but it will be interesting too understand more of the history of these early systems.