Creating A Boot Disc On a 400k Floppy

 

 

As you probably know, creating a System 1 boot disk on a late-model Mac can be a little tricky. System 1 was pre-HFS (Hierarchical File System), so making a boot disk on a recent Mac running a later System creates problems. Even if you can drag the System files that you want to a freshly formatted 400K disk, that disk may fail to boot early machines. Some attempts at this will be luckier than others. The early Mac 64K ROMs definitely are less tolerant of badly copied disks than later issues.

There are two reliable ways that I know of to create a 400K boot disk. Both methods require you to have a working System 1 boot disk before you even start, so if you have no such disk, it's back to square one (sorry, an American expression, I think).

1) Create a new System disk by dragging files between floppies on a 128K or 512K Mac. Boot the Mac from the working System 1 disk, format a new disk, and copy all the System files to the new disk.

2) Create a System 1 copy using Apple's Disk Copy v4.2 or earlier. On a newer Mac (but preferrably NOT a PowerMac, I don't know why), make a disk image of the known working copy of System 1, then create a copy of the disk from that new image file. Save the disk image of System 1 on a hard disk, and you'll be able to make copies of it any time you want.

Note: don't use the latest version of Disk Copy (6.1.2) for this function; it has trouble with 400K disks.

Jon Gaines

gaines@frontiernet.net