Does anyone else do this? Is this not the geekiest thing to do?
I have an old PowerMac 6100 (66 MHz CPU) running OS 8.6 (which, for those of you who are not that familiar with Macs, is a pretty up-to-date OS.) I discovered a while ago that I can install the Mac OS onto a 100 MB Zip disk, and just tell the computer to use the Zip disk as the “startup” disk next time I reboot. Pretty cool, huh? So, I install System 7.5 (an old OS) onto the Zip disk - takes up about 75 MBs of space. So I then install some old EarthLink software, and through some trial and error, I am on the Internet, running System 7.5 on a Zip disk! It’s weird - I can hear the Zip disk making “working” sounds as I tool around the internet.
I know that having a Zip “backup” disk is a good idea with a Mac - if the “main” hard disk is having troubles, you can switch over to the Zip disk and then see if you can repair what’s wrong with the “main” hard disk.
Can anything like this be done with Windows? (I think Iomega had some utility that could sorta do it, but I don’t think you can use the Zip disk like a regular hard drive, and get on the Interenet and everything with it.)
So, I just had to share this with the rest of you. Anyone else do anything this geeky?
Hey, yosemitebabe, I’m still reading ‘PC’s For Idiots’ so I’m a beginner’s beginner, but I hated not to congratulate you for your accomplishment, and because it sounds so intricate to me. I probably admire it more than anyone else right now!!!
I have a boot disk with a basic freebsd system installed on a LS-120 disk. The drive reads from 120mb “SuperDisks”, and also reads from normal floppies a whole lot faster. I’ve had to use it to boot up this machine a few times, from me doing stupid things such as deleting critical libraries
Hey, that’s a great idea! Maybe they should make these Zip disks standards parts for a computer… in fact, they can probably be really crazy and put the Zip drive inside the case. And… maybe… they can find some way to make the memory capacity larger? Perhaps make the disk itself larger, too? And I’d imagine that if the disk were designed to be non-removable, it’d transfer memory a lot faster…
Yeah, if they made these internal, extra-large, fixed Zip disks, they’d be a lot better than those crappy hard drives…
windows machines cna use a zip as a bootable device, but they don’t like it much. the OS is so clunky, it just doesn’t mesh well. as far as i know, you just need to have a decent boot loader.
now if you really want to be cool, try stacking some old floppy drives together and running it that way. that would be neat.
but just about the coolest thing can be seen at http://www.linux-hacket.net where this guy, well, you just need to see it.
::raising hand:: another geek here! Yes, I have booted many a time from Zip (Mac, of course). Let’s see, what else?
I thought booting from CD was pretty cool the first time I did it, but that’s not new or fascinating any more I guess…
Back before Zips existed, I had a 21MB drive called a “Floptical”, same size as a regular diskette, and I booted from that (System 7 on an SE).
Booted from SyQuest.
Weirdest medium I ever tried to boot from: a tape drive normally used for backup. Startup Disk Control Panel could see it, and when I rebooted I would get a “happy Mac” and the tape drive would whirr like crazy, but hours later it would still be stuck there, never made it to the “Starting Up” screen. I don’t think the mechanics of booting up favor a linear medium like tape.
I booted a very stripped-down version of MacOS 8 from a 1.44 floppy by ripping out half the resources with ResEdit and replacing the Finder with a much smaller file manager and setting the type and creator to FNDR and MACS respectively.
We booted a P-133 with 32M of RAM off of the harddrive in another machine on our network once (Win98se), then played Unreal Tournament, running it off of a third machine, with it… Wasn’t very fun.
Reminds me of a few years ago when I was running a second computer that had no hard drive at all. It was a 286 that had never had one installed; it onyl had two 360k floppy drives.
So I used to boot it from drive A with a complex routine that would kickstart DOS 3.3, establish a RAM drive of about 100k, copy the command interpreter (command.com) and a tiny set of essential utilities to the RAM drive, and reset the comspec to the RAM drive. The nett result was that the machine, once booted, would run without needing to access a floppy, until a specific application needed to be loaded.
Seriously, it was a wise investment buying such a dinosaur of a machine. I learnt to use DOS extremely well, and I learnt the value of making the best use of tiny system resources.
[Old Man] Back in my day, we used to run an entire 8088 off of one 360K floppy. And we liked it.[/Old Man]
Seriously, because of the size of the Windows OS (NT or 98), it is not entirely possible to do the same thing with windows. You can technically boot off a zip disk, but files on the hard drive are still needed to make things work. Another of the problems of bloated software.
While I’m impressed that you’re resourceful enough to run MacOS off a Zip, I can top that.
My company makes a firewall that runs on a 1.44mb floppy disk. It’s a barebones linux shell that runs on a computer with a floppy drive, 1gb of RAM, 2 10/100 network cards, and a video card. There’s no hard drive, and after we boot the system, we remove the floppy disk and let the shell run off memory, exclusively. Fast as hell.
Actually DOS 1.0 used a 160kB 5-1/4" single-sided floppy. It wasn’t until DOS 1.1 that the 320kB double-sided floppies were introduced. I think that it was DOS 2.0 where they upped it from 8 sectors per track to 9 sectors per track on a floppy, increasing capacity from 320kB to 360kB (or from 160kB to 180kB on a single-sided disk).
I remember when the second-generation IBM PC’s came out with the double-sided disks and the blazingly fast 8MHz 8088 processers (up from 6MHz). Boy they could really cook.
Oh yeah, I forgot about RAM disks! My housemate Michael had inherited an old Mac Plus. For those of you who don’t know, a Mac Plus had up to 4MB of RAM but no hard drive and could only use 800K diskettes, so it had 5 times more RAM than storage space. So I set up Michael with a System 6.0.8 diskette which would boot, create a 1.5MB RAM disk, copy essential system files to the RAM disk, and expand compressed copies of other items into the RAM disk, then eject itself, giving him a computer with an operating system that took up more space than his largest available storage device. As with yours, it would run without needing access to any physical drive until a specific app needed to be loaded, or a file saved to disk for use later.
Not sure which article you were looking at though.
I just started learning Linux a couple weeks ago. I can’t believe how small and versatile it can be. Looking forward to doing lots of fun stuff like this in the future.
