Re: Definitive guide for writing Lisa disk images to floppies

Peter wrote:
> Amy I doing something fundamentally wrong?
>
> Also, some files are BLAH.archive.hqx. I know the hqx,
> but what format is the archive part? Is that supposed to
> be the extension for a disk image file.
>
>
Sadly, yes, though it's not your fault. Old world Macs have a TYPE and CREATOR bit of metadata for each file that define what application to run and what kind of file they are. These are 32 bit values reresented as 4 ASCII characters.

If the files were encoded with MacBinaryII or HQX or SIT, UnStuffIt will be able to set the right types.

Naked Mac files on the web without this data need the data to be fixed, while files enclosed with MacBinII or BinHex (aka HQX) or StuffIt or Compactor Pro, or even ZipIt don't since they carry the metadata.

This article describes them:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA25699?viewlocale=en_US More here: http://kb.iu.edu/data/aemh.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creator_code

The best thing to do is to drop whatever file you downloaded onto UnStuffIt incase it has a MacBinary or HQX enclosure, let it deal with that, and if they're encoded with either of those (or some obscure ones such as AppleSingle/Double) it'll handle those and you'll see an icon on the image file.

UnStuffIt will let you drop anything on top of it, and doesn't use the file type to decide what kind of file it is, so it'll do its best to extract whatever kind of archive you throw at it and will undo/strip MacBinII headers and decode HQX, etc.

But for the ones off the web that are just .image or .dart, that UnSit doesn't do anything with, you may need to reset them manually in order to get DART and DiskCopy to recognize them. There's a utility that does it called FileTyper, there's also ResEdit which can do the same thing.

For Compactor (.cpt) archives use: 'CPCT' as the file type and 'PACT' as the creator (without the quotes on all of these.) For StuffIt, use 'SIT5' as the creator and 'SIT!' (or 'SITx') as the type (there's some version difference there.) For DiskCopy 4.2, use 'dImg' for the file type and 'dCpy' for the creator For DART, use 'DART' for the file type and I think the creator is 'DMd2'

FileTyper can be downloaded from here:
http://dazuma.freeshell.org/filetyper/index.html There's another similar program here, but I've never tried it. http://www.frederikseiffert.de/filetype/

see: http://lisafaq.sunder.net/lisafaq-hw-media-floppy_dc42.html for the other details.

I should update the FAQ with that info. :-)

And again, when dealing with Lisa DiskCopy disks, *ALWAYS* use Disk Copy 4.2, never any newer version or they'll fail to work properly.

Good luck. Received on 2009-02-18 13:04:29