>I have a Macintosh ("128K") and I have been having some serious problems
>making boot disks for it.
>
>I have used Macs for quite a few years and have worked extensively with
>System 7 and know my way around Disk Copy and etc but these 400K boot
>disks just aren't working. I use a Mac SE with Disk Copy 4.2 to write a
>"Disk Tools" image file (or something similar) to a floppy and then try to
>boot the Macintosh with it and it spits it back out and returns to the "?"
>Disk icon.
>snip<
First thing that comes to mind is that you may have a file system problem.
IIRC the 128's 400k disks were not just 800k disks with only one side
written onto (things I remember using with System 5 on my first SE), but
the older systems used MFS instead of System 5 and above's HFS. So you may
run into trouble using floppies formatted using System 6 for 800k or even
for 400k; I can't remember from the top of my head if the formatting dialog
offered a choice between 800k/400k(HFS)/400k(MFS) and I can't try it out
because the Compacts I have at hand run System 7.1, the others with 6 are
stowed away for the moment and the Plus is at my room in the hospital. Of
course, the surefire solution always is to format disks in the machine they
are meant to work with, but you're in a catch there as long as you don't
have a working Tools disk and maybe an external floppy drive to speed
things up. And for the HD 20, you'll need a System disk with the HD 20
INIT. Sorry if all this does not really help, but I don't have as much
insight in these problems as the guys that chimed in when we had the thread
about early system software in March. I hope Eric Rasmussen will give some
advice, in the meantime I quote his post, also in regard of the usability
of OS 6 flavours in a less-than-1-MB-machine:
From: Eric Rasmussen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Early systems from Apple: my 2�
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 10:19:57 -0500
X-Seen: false
X-TOI-SPAM: n;0;2004-03-23T15:20:11Z
<x-flowed><http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/
Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/
Older_System/System_6.0.x/>
My understanding of the System 6 offerings at the Apple site (the
following is based on the assumption that somebody at Apple did
actually think about what to provide):
6.0.3: From the text file: "This software has been made available for
customers who have 1MB of memory, or less." Apple then lists the Mac
Plus and SE (among others). They don't list the 512Ke, but the "or
less" clause is, no doubt, a reference to the 512Ke (and equivalent
upgrades to the 128K and 512K) ... I've tested it on my 512Ke and it
works great (using WriteNow 2.2).
6.0.5: This, then, is intended for floppy-driven Mac Plus and SE
machines with more than 1 MB of memory (but no hard drive attached).
6.0.8: This is best for machines with hard drives and more than 1 MB of
memory.
Now if only Apple would provide the last release that supported both
the 128K and 512K, System 3.2 with Finder 5.1 (June 1986) ...
Eric
You may know that Eric also did a very fine overview of early Mac OS
versions which is more precise by far than the Knowledge Base Article ID:
15582. I will not quote it here as I archived it as a MacWrite document
and as Eric meanwhile may have updated it. But there is hope we can read
him here soon, and maybe Mr. LaPorta will open his archives...
Cheers, OM
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