Need help creating floppy disks for Mac 512K

[neosunrise]

I was trying to create floppy disks for my Macintosh 512k that has a 400K drive. The disk image was downloaded from here: https://archive.org/download/mac_Psi...sion_Chess.dsk

I used a tool called "MacDisk" to format a 1.44MB disk on my Windows 10 computer and copied the dsk file to the disk. I then copied the file to my PowerBook 180 via the disk. Everything was okay till this point. I had issues recognizing the image with DiskCopy 4.2. It kept saying something like the dsk file was not a valid disk image. The PB runs System 7.1. I also tried it on my Macintosh LCII to no avail. What tool should I use to convert the dsk file to something that is compatible with DiskCopy 4.2? The dsk file ran okay in the vMac Mini emulator.

Any help is appreciated!

 

[olePigeon]

I was trying to create floppy disks for my Macintosh 512k that has a 400K drive. The disk image was downloaded from here: https://archive.org/download/mac_Psi...sion_Chess.dsk

I used a tool called "MacDisk" to format a 1.44MB disk on my Windows 10 computer and copied the dsk file to the disk. I then copied the file to my PowerBook 180 via the disk. Everything was okay till this point. I had issues recognizing the image with DiskCopy 4.2. It kept saying something like the dsk file was not a valid disk image. The PB runs System 7.1. I also tried it on my Macintosh LCII to no avail. What tool should I use to convert the dsk file to something that is compatible with DiskCopy 4.2? The dsk file ran okay in the vMac Mini emulator.

Any help is appreciated!

DiskCopy 6.3 should be able to convert the .dsk to DiskCopy 4.2. I think DiskDup+ can also do it. But then again, you can just use DiskCopy 6.3 to write the .dsk file to disk and skip version 4.2 all-together. v4.2 is useful if you have a System 6 machine since v6.3 requires System 7 or later.

Another option is to get a Floppy Emu since it can read .dsk files natively. BMOW also released a utility for Windows and macOS for converting DiskCopy 4.2 images to .dsk (but not the other way around.)

 

[GiGaBiTe]

my Windows 10 computer and copied the dsk file to the disk. I then copied the file to my PowerBook 180 via the disk. Everything was okay till this point. I had issues recognizing the image with DiskCopy 4.2. It kept saying something like the dsk file was not a valid disk image. The PB runs System 7.1. I also tried it on my Macintosh LCII to no avail

The problem you're having is Windows clobbering the resource fork of the file and corrupting it.

Classic Mac System software up until OS 8 and HFS+ used a dual forked file format, where it had a resource fork and a data fork. The resource fork was used for things like icons, program code and strings, while the data fork was used to store data.

The problem with this is that no other operating system has any concept of dual forked files, and the file just existing on a non-Apple file system like FAT, NTFS, EXT, etc. will clobber the resource fork and render the file useless.

One way to get around this is to store all of the files you want to transfer in a stuffit expander archive, binhex or compact pro archive, which will preserve the resource forks across systems, but the best way would be to just have a Mac on the internet and download the file directly to transfer it over to whatever other Mac you're working on.

 

[neosunrise]

Thanks guys for your helpful tips! I finally got everything to work. DiskCopy 6.3 works without any problem but my Stuffit Expander 4.0.1 was not able to decompress many of the packages. I had to install the 5.0 version to resolve the issue. As a summary, in case this can help other people, this is what I did on my PC and PowerBook:
1. Download Stuffit Expander 5.5 to PC from here: https://www.gryphel.com/c/sw/archive/stuffexp/
2. Copy the installer from PC to a 1.44MB floppy disk using MacDisk
3. Copy the installer from the floppy disk to PowerBook (PB)
4. Install Stuffit Expander 5.5 on PB
5. Download Disk_Copy_(v6.3.3).sit to PC from here: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2416-diskcopy-4-2-5-0-5-5-6-0-6-2-6-3-3-6-4-6-5b13-7-0-8-0
6. Copy the sit file from PC to a 1.44MB floppy disk using MacDisk
7. Decompress the sit file with Stuffit Expander 5.5 on PB
8. Now the tools are all properly set up.

To create a disk from an image, you need to download the sit file and decompress it with Stuffit Expander 5.5 and then use DiskCopy 6.3.3 to mount it or write to disk. It was pretty intuitive afterwards. My original setup, i.e., Stuffit Expander 4.0.1 + DiskCopy 4.2 did not work very well for most sit files.