Re: Copying Mac MFS disks on an Apple II

["M. Pender" <mpender@hotmail.com>]

ground.ecn AppleII Librarian <apple2pd@ground.ecn.uiowa.edu> wrote in
message news:biin1b$cbl$1@server05.icaen.uiowa.edu...
> In article <3d7aa99a.0308252008.4d3aaa65@posting.google.com>,
>
> Possibly the ProDOS system utilities may work if it doesn't insist on
> reformatting the disk.  Use davex or something similar to format the disk
> as single-sided. (eg, init .51 -1 ).  Then use a disk copy pgm to copy
> blocks.  This may not work because the MFS disk may have data that
> doesn't fit in the 512 byte blocks.  There were a copy of utils to extract
> files from HFS disks (HFSlink was one, the other name escapes me at the
> moment), but I do not know if they work on MFS disks also.  Get an old mac
> running system 4 or 5 (?) and trying converting the disk to HFS.  I have
> some old Mac 400K external drives if that helps.

IIRC Mac HFS disk blocks are not the same size as ProDos disk blocks; there
are a few extra bytes thrown.  A simple block-by-block copy using MLI calls
would not catch the additional data, and I doubt that the 512 byte ProDos
blocks will be very appealing to the Mac.

 - Mike