[WinMac] Re: WinMac Digest #221 - 02/08/99 -- Floppyless iMac
John W. McCarthy(jwmcmac[at]flash.net)
Tue, 09 Feb 1999 01:51:32 -0600
I believe if you have make some self-mounting floppy images of your
utility disks to mount on your iMac desktop, you should be able to do
almost anything you could do if you actually had a floppy (and possible
more) . . . although iThink they should have had a floppy or a SuperDisk
built in for convenience . . . but then that may be the price of moving
forward. Anyway, the SuperDisk is a bootable drive from the 120 meg
disk or the 1.4, isn't it? If so, then not a problem.
Boot any way you choose . . . either from a CD or from some form of
external drive or from the network itself (isn't that possible with the
iMac?). Can you even re-boot from a Ram-disk . . . though I am not sure
about that one).
The only stipulation for running Norton Utilities 4.0 for Mac is that
you have the Norton Shared Lib and the ObjectSupportLib in the same
folder as the Norton application you are running. It is not a
requirement to have Norton on the boot-up disk. However, it is "better"
to have it on any other drive than the one you are fixing. You can even
start up with extensions off and run Norton (however, the Apple CD-Rom
or Apple CD/DVD Driver extension must remain on if booting from a floppy
-- must be in the system folder of the floppy that you boot from).
Apple's Disk First Aid is better than ever. It can now repair even the
boot-disk and the disk/drive from which it is running . . . that's new .
. . and has been a big relief in making things easier.
Even with all the improvements, sometimes all of this is a juggling act,
but all is possible to be done by an ordinary mortal with a little
patience and persistence.
After saying all the above, is it "easy" to run disk repair utilities on
the Mac?
Easier than trying to do any of it on a Wintel. Most of the above could
not be attempted by a mere mortal on the Wintel side of things . . . I
think . . . but it is probably getting better all the time over there
too . . . or is it.
Side thought:
If the Mac is one thing, it is "versatile". And this is due to the Mac
shareware authors being the perfect compliment to the Mac OS over the
years. If they go away, Apple will have lost its glory. I am glad to
see Apple offering more and more programming tools for free these days
(such as the Inside Mac series online and for free download). I hope
these offerings of free and almost free programming tools continues --
with a steady improvement of the tutorial tools too. Without great
programmers what have you got? Zilch.
My vote for top two Mac utilities over the years is *"ShrinkWrap"* and
"Stuffit-Lite". Of the many great and indispensable apps, these made it
possible to do the otherwise impossible on the Mac . . . and still do .
. . like when I installed system 7.5.5 on my Mac Plus using the 1.4 meg
install image files stuffed and unstuffed using Stuffit-Lite and created
and mounted using ShrinkWrap, all transferred with 800k floppies . . .
elementary my dear Watson. But of course, all of the Mac shareware apps
are indispensable.
Once again, God Bless us all.
Pat Kelly McCarthy
> ----------
> >From: "The Windows-MacOS cooperation list" <winmac@xerxes.frit.utexas.edu>
> >To: "The Windows-MacOS cooperation list" <winmac@xerxes.frit.utexas.edu>
> >Subject: WinMac Digest #219 - 02/06/99
> >Date: Sat, Feb 6, 1999, 5:00 PM
> >
>
> > What the iMac lacks is a way to boot the machine and run disk
> > repair/recovery utilities *easily*... And I underscore the word EASILY.
> > Yes, you can boot from a CD, but then what happens when you can't run a
> > repair program because there is no second drive...
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