Copying a Mac Disk with a Single Drive - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

7 Feb 2007

...
  If I am remembering correctly, older systems can't
format during a
 copy, but later ones can.  What I seem to think was the single-disk
 copying procedure is to eject the System disk (Flower-E or Flower-1?),
 you want <COMMAND>-E for copying. the "1" thing (<COMMAND>
<SHIFT> 1 if 
I remember right) was the "force eject" for the first floppy drive at 
startup if normal methods (drag-to-trash or eject command) failed.

...
  It's all quite tedious, but possible.  If
there's anyway you can
 borrow a second 400K floppy, you will find this somewhat trivial.  You
 can also copy 400K disks in more modern Macs, so don't think you are
 limited to using a 128K Mac to copy single-sided MFS disks.  I can't
 say for certain how new the gear can be, but at the very least, I'd be
 surprised if a Mac SE or SE/30 running System 6 couldn't still do it. 
You want to use either a Mac II or earlier, or a SE/30 or IIcx/IIci 
with an external 400 or 800k floppy. The SuperDrive (original 
SuperDrive, not the "new" CD/DVD one) [present on all Macs since the 
IIx, many IIs and some SEs (SE FDHD)] has the smaller head size and 
your older machine won't read it properly. WRT the swapping- can't 
recall at this point if changing the disk cache/RAM cache (depending on 
your system version)  setting makes any difference, but the default 
gives you lots of wrist exercise even on a 4MB Mac SE/800k.