Re: Desktop Icons

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Rich Hare <rhare@mich.com> wrote:

>I've got a new small problem with my IIGS.
>I have a Bluedisk card which has worked very well for years, and still
>does.  I changed a few things around last month, and now have a new
>problem.  Previously, when I put a MSDOS disk in the drive, and pushed
>"Control" to poll the drive, the disk would appear on the desktop and I
>could "drag and drop" to copy from the icon.  (The MSDOS FST is read
>only)
>
>Now, the icon doesn't appear on the desktop.  The Watson utilities (and
>others as well, such as Utilityworks, find the disk just fine; it just
>doesn't appear on the desktop.
>
>I've corresponded with Joachim Lange, and he believes some Finder file
>is corrupted:
>"What's going wrong is that the Finder is somewhat confused about your 
>icons. It seems that the desktop file is corrupted which results in 
>displaying wrong or no icons."
>He suggests that the comp.sys.apple2 group might help me.
>
>Any ideas?

It is easy to blame the Desktop file, but there's only one
problem: if that file is corrupting the floppy icon, you will
not see the icon for your regular floppy disks either.  The
MS-DOS disk icon is no different from a ProDOS or an
HFS disk icon.

Try putting a 1.44MB ProDOS formatted disk into the PC
drive connected to the BlueDisk card and hit the Control
key.  Does the ProDOS disk's icon show up?  If it does,
then the problem is not the Desktop file.

Since I operate a Superdrive on my IIGS and have seen
the "missing disk icon" effect first hand, let me tell you
what's the real problem:  VFAT.  Starting in Win 95 and
now also in Win 98, Windows changed the way files
are stored on floppy disks to accomodate long file
names.  Unfortunately, the MS-DOS FST does not know
how to deal with this.  The result is it not mounting the
disk to the Finder at all!

There's really nothing you can do about it.  Best bet is
to install Peter Watson's MUG!  It'll let you read and
write your MS-DOS disks from the Finder even if they
do not mount and MUG! will handle Win 95 and
Win 98 floppies unlike the MS-DOS FST.

(I hope everyone reads this before we get several
dozen attacks on the Desktop file.  ;-)