Help: Write IIgs disks from Mac ?

[n9yty@bigfoot.com (Steven Palm)]

I was a Commodore person in the old days... Vic-20 through the Amiga. 
Then I had a brief stint with PC's, Windows, etc, and in the last three
years or so have moved entirely to Macintosh.  Now, I'm in nostalgia mode,
and managed to get myself an Apple IIgs.  Territory I never explored
before, and I find it interesting.


It's a ROM3 machine with a 1MB expansion board in it.  I have two 3.5"
floppies, and two 5.25" drives.  I understand it can only support two at a
time, but I thought it might be useful for various combinations of copying
disks.

But...   I have no system disks, and trying to create them has been
interesting to say the least.

I have tried, using a PowerPC 6100 at work under MacOS 9.1, to make disks
from the System disks from Apple and other sources I've found.  DiskCopy
reports a successful disk creation, but when I try to boot I get a "UNABLE
TO LOAD PRODOS" or similar error message.

Now, I also tried making the same disk on my Classic at home using
DiskCopy 4.2 and System 7.1, and it worked fine.  Strange...

I then loaded DiskCopy 4.2 on the PowerPC 6100 at work and tried again
from the same image file, and it couldn't make a bootable disk.  I took a
drive out of the Apple IIgs enclosure, put it into the 6100, and wrote the
disk again.  Still no go.  I put the Mac drive into the IIgs enclosure,
and it would boot the one I made on the Classic, but not anything made on
the 6100.

Does any of this ring a bell?   In order to write a useful image, do I
have to be running older system software (7.1?)?  This is the only
variable that seems to be making the difference, or is it in the hardware
controller of the 6100?  These were all attempted on DS/DD disks, not HD
disks.


On a side note, I've found that the company (allelec?) still has HD units
available, and I'll probably spend the money just to get it operational to
put down with the Classic in my "What a marvel for their time" museum. 
Then again, it's not like their useless, and I'm sure before it get's
"filed away" I'll have some great fun playing around with it all for at
least a few months.

Please e-mail suggestions/answers if you can.