In the process of trying to get this Mac up and running it's been essential to be able to write floppy disk images. As I mentioned previously, I have a USB floppy drive which is great and just works.
BUT, disaster befell my laptop today. I turned it on. And got nothing. Just a terse message about there being no boot disk detected. O. M. G.
All of the partition information on the drive had gone. Just gone. To cut a long story short I ended up having to re-install windows. What the hell happened?
In the process of re-installing windows, I decided to get back to writing another floppy for the Mac which included a bootable version the hard drive tools but patched to allow me to format any SCSI drive. For this I borrowed my son's laptop. It's recently been re-formatted and so had virtually nothing on it. Good job really...
To write the floppy disks I'd been using WinImage. So I re-installed WinImage and proceeded to try to write a disk image to the floppy drive. I got an error message. This was odd. I'd previously used something to write the Mac floppies so something must've gone wrong somewhere. I headed to the WinImage webpages and found a lot of comments about issues with writing to USB floppy drives. As I read down the comments a rather large feeling of dread crept over me. Many users were complaining that writing USB floppies had wiped their hard disks. And that they didn't even realise until they re-started. OH. SHIT.
I restarted my son's laptop. "NO BOOT DISK."
It appears that the program WinImage has some difficulty distinguishing between 'A' and 'C' drives which, I think very simply is down to changes in Windows because, well, floppies. No-one uses them now...
So now I understood the reason for the sudden apparent hard disk failure. Basically, the program had dutifully written 1.44Mb over the first few sectors of my 930Gb hard disk, wiping out the partition information and any hope of getting my data back. I then, very carefully, repeated the escapade on my son's laptop.
I still couldn't understand how I had written the Mac disks though. Then I remembered that I had the error with WinImage at my first attempt so went and found another app called Rawrite for Windows which DID work. All this, of course, took place before I restarted my laptop...
A warning. DO NOT USE WINIMAGE FOR FLOPPY DISKS. YOU WILL FEEL SAD AFTERWARDS. Note that it works great for SD cards etc. Just DONT use it for floppy disks.
My laptop is recovering slowly as I remember what I had installed and re-install stuff. Most of my family photo's are uploaded to DropBox (I learned THAT lesson a few years ago) but there's a lot of stuff which I will never get back.
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