Starting the New Year Right - Macintosh 512K - Part 2

As I mentioned in the last bLog post, I've recently become the next owner of a Macintosh 512K computer.  One of the first things I'd do with most of my Retro Computers is figure out how to get some kind of Flash Storage solution going for the system, but my goals for this system have been somewhat different.

One of the main things I was hoping to get out of this was experience and a workflow setup for creating bootable Single Sided, Double Density (400K) Floppies for the earliest Macs from Disk Images.  That's been an ongoing interest of mine, and one I've bLogged about before a couple of times.

I've had good success in the past creating 1.44 MB and 800K floppies for Mac OS installers from disk images from the Internet, using a Beige Power Mac, but I was really struggling with 400K disk images.  You can find disk images on the Internet and suggested workflows, but I was not able to use any of the downloaded disk images I could find with Disk Copy 4.2, as the resource fork from these disk image files had been stripped and the files were no longer useable with the older version of Disk Copy.

Then I remembered my FloppyEmu.  These are a bit expensive so I have only one, and usually have it connected to an Apple II computer.  Moving it onto the Mac requires that the firmware be re-programmed, it's not a huge task, but I usually avoid it.  At this point, I could avoid it no longer and I'm glad I didn't because it ended up being exactly what was needed.

As a test, I started out with my Macintosh Plus because I can boot it from SCSI2SD and I have a large range of OS choices, for this, I choose 6.0.8 because it's got good native support for the 400K disks, so the disks I'd image would be immediately readable and testable on the disk imaging machine.

I started out with Mac II Disk v. 5.2, and used the settings shown here...

I apologize for the scanlines on the screen, but to summarize, we are doing a single-sided, sector by sector copy from FloppyEmu too the real internal floppy drive.  This worked great, and how I have a floppy disk set with Mac OSs from 1.1 up to 3.3 on 400K floppies that work great in the 512K.

However, this method isn't perfect because it requires the use of the FloppyEmu each time.  (as I've mentioned, I prefer to leave this connected to an Apple II).  So, I fired up Disk Copy 4.2, and used it to grab backup copies of the disks from FloppyEmu as .image files, with correctly formatted resource forks.  I have these files safely backed up to the cloud, as well as ready to go on my disk imaging rig any time additional floppies are needed.

These are all files that ship on FloppyEmu, just in a different file format that should work with the workflow I've described.  If you have any comments, questions, or feedback about this workflow or the files, please let me know!