Re: You CAN copy Mac disks on a IIgs

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Willi Kusche wrote:

>    To make a long story short, you can copy Mac disks with a IIgs and
>a couple of 3.5 inch Apple drives.  HFS disks can be copied with any
>volume copy utility.  MFS disks (400K) can be copied by simply copying
>the first 800 blocks.  I verified copies of both kinds by booting from
>a 3.5 inch Apple disk connected to the back of a Mac SE.  I had to use
>the external drive because the internal drive doesn't work.
>
>    The copies I made on the IIgs will not work in an old Mac single
>sided drive.  That's because an Apple 3.5 inch drive apparently can't
>be forced into formatting just one side of a disk.  I verified this by
>formatting a disk with MS/DOS then formatting that disk with an old
>version of the Mac O/S that allows you to specify a one-sided format. 
>After the Mac format, tracks 40 and higher could still be read by a
>sector editor on an MS/DOS system.

Since a real 400K drive can't read the "other" side of a disk, it
does not matter whether that side is formatted or not.

What does matter is what is written to the side that it does read,
and that is entirely a matter of software.  The appropriate IIgs
software could easily write 400K data on one side of a disk so
that it would be indistinguishable from a Mac 400K disk.

Apparently there has been little need for such software to be
written.  ;-)

-michael

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