Re: Booting off floptical

[taob@ionews.io.org (Brian Tao)]

In article <1993Nov12.061419.3586@pro-applejacks.cts.com>, Glenn Koproske writes...
> 
> Whoa, hold on there.  You say you CAN do this amazing feat, but HAVE you
> ever done it?  It would be great if this works, but I have my doubts
> about how smart the Installer script is.  When it wants a new system
> disk, does it continue to prompt you to insert it, or does it
> automatically read the floptical and find the "volume" and access it
> seamlessly?

    Yes, I can do it and I have done it.  The Installer script is
extremely dumb.  That's why it doesn't care if you are installing from a
hard drive or a Syquest or a floptical or a 3.5" disk.  It simply looks
for a volume called "Installer" (or whatever) and that's it.  I don't
think you see the "Please insert disk" dialog even for a split second. 

    It came in very handy today when a friend of mine had to bring in a
set of system disks to an Apple dealer in town (his GS was in the shop).
Apple Canada would not give the dealer a set of the system software, so
my friend had to provide his own.  He was over here this morning, so I
popped in the floptical, up came seven icons (six System 6.01 and one HD
boot partition backup) and I did some quick disk-to-disk copies. 
Flopticals are also very cool for storing disk images for usergroup
libraries.  The drive itself is very small (unlike the Syquest) so you
can bring it around to meetings, SIG's, swap meets, etc.

-- 
Brian Tao:: taob@io.org (Internex Online, 416-363-3783, 27 lines, v.32bis)
::::::::::: 90taobri@wave.scar.utoronto.ca (University of Toronto, 9T4)