sqpat
Experienced Member
For those of you without a 90s-00's or so Mac as an in-between system or a 1.4MB floppy drive, I managed to copy a bunch of applications to my Mac SE over a zip drive after a lot of trial and error using just modern systems. Of course, the problem is the lack of HFS support on modern operating systems (or the lack of ability to write 800 KB mac floppies). I feel like there's not enough information in one place about this subject so I'm writing how I did it here. Now, if your vintage macintosh has stuffit, this process isn't so bad as there are a few easier ways to copy .sit files to the macintosh. But for those of you without stuffit, there's still a way!
First, some things I tried that didn't work -
hfsplus package on Linux
- Linux has some limited support for the HFS filesystem, but can't really deal with application files/resource forks. They are always read and copied as 0 byte files. I think if your mac already has stuffit, you could just copy .sit files of everything successfully with linux. However, as I did not have stuffit installed, I had a chicken and egg problem here.
A modern mac
- Modern macs and macOS only have read only support for HFS. It seems HFS support was removed several years ago. The problem is somewhat recent and there doesn't seem to be HFS utilities for modern macs.
Various windows HFS/HFS+ viewers
There are a dozen of these. I didn't try any of the paid software. In the end there were one or two that could read directly a mounted HFS formatted device. None could modify them. Some could burn images to 1.4MB floppies or CDs, none of which my Mac SE had.
Now, here's what you need to get this method of file transfer to work.
- A vintage Mac with the iomega zip drive drivers already installed (Probably the biggest caveat to this whole setup. Does anyone have a way of getting a Mac to read the zip disk without a driver?)
- SCSI Zip Drive for the classic mac.
- USB Zip Drive for the modern computer
- A working 100MB zip disk
- Windows PC (or VM?)
- Some way to use the dd command on the USB zip drive, be it a linux/mac machine or vm.
- hfvexplorer: http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/hfvexplorer
1) From windows use hfvexplorer to create a new 100 MB HFS volume. File->Format New Volume. (or possibly, dd an empty HFS formatted zip drive)
2) Presumably you have a .dsk file with your application. Open that in HFVexplorer.
3) Copy the files from the .dsk file into the image using hfvexplorer. Your mac wont know what to do with the .dsk, and a windows filesystem is incompatible with its contents.
4) Save the image, then Use dd to burn the image to your zip drive.
4.5) Grab some coffee. The above step can take upwards of 20 minutes!
5) Put the zip disk into your scsi zip drive in the mac and it should be able to read the disk and applications fine
To make things a lot easier for yourself, you can do this to copy stuffit onto the zip disk, then just copy .sit images onto the disk using a linux vm in the future.
First, some things I tried that didn't work -
hfsplus package on Linux
- Linux has some limited support for the HFS filesystem, but can't really deal with application files/resource forks. They are always read and copied as 0 byte files. I think if your mac already has stuffit, you could just copy .sit files of everything successfully with linux. However, as I did not have stuffit installed, I had a chicken and egg problem here.
A modern mac
- Modern macs and macOS only have read only support for HFS. It seems HFS support was removed several years ago. The problem is somewhat recent and there doesn't seem to be HFS utilities for modern macs.
Various windows HFS/HFS+ viewers
There are a dozen of these. I didn't try any of the paid software. In the end there were one or two that could read directly a mounted HFS formatted device. None could modify them. Some could burn images to 1.4MB floppies or CDs, none of which my Mac SE had.
Now, here's what you need to get this method of file transfer to work.
- A vintage Mac with the iomega zip drive drivers already installed (Probably the biggest caveat to this whole setup. Does anyone have a way of getting a Mac to read the zip disk without a driver?)
- SCSI Zip Drive for the classic mac.
- USB Zip Drive for the modern computer
- A working 100MB zip disk
- Windows PC (or VM?)
- Some way to use the dd command on the USB zip drive, be it a linux/mac machine or vm.
- hfvexplorer: http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/hfvexplorer
1) From windows use hfvexplorer to create a new 100 MB HFS volume. File->Format New Volume. (or possibly, dd an empty HFS formatted zip drive)
2) Presumably you have a .dsk file with your application. Open that in HFVexplorer.
3) Copy the files from the .dsk file into the image using hfvexplorer. Your mac wont know what to do with the .dsk, and a windows filesystem is incompatible with its contents.
4) Save the image, then Use dd to burn the image to your zip drive.
4.5) Grab some coffee. The above step can take upwards of 20 minutes!
5) Put the zip disk into your scsi zip drive in the mac and it should be able to read the disk and applications fine
To make things a lot easier for yourself, you can do this to copy stuffit onto the zip disk, then just copy .sit images onto the disk using a linux vm in the future.
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