Mac OS X will let you format a USB floppy with HFS+. Classic Mac OS would never let you do this. HFS+ floppies can be read by System 8.1 and up.
In thinking about what Mini vMac will have to do to support vintage Mac hardware, I realized the one simple thing that will allow us to transfer files from Snow Leopard to a Mac Plus, IIx and up, is the ability to use Zip drives and floppy disks, respectively. Clearly there is no way to use AFP without one or two intermediary Macs. But the sneaker method would work quite well if one small thing were possible: Disk Copy.
Since the ZIP and 1.44MB floppy disks can be formatted HFS or HFS+ using the same rotational speed and media, it should be a simple task to duplicate an HFS disk image to the media bit-by-bit. This is even easier than Apple's Disk Copy which could write an MFS disk image to a 400K or 800K disk regardless of whether the Finder could read the disk, but only on a SuperDrive capable of variable speed control.
Anyone see a reason why an OS X Disk Copy utility couldn't be written under Snow Leopard to copy an HFS disk image created in Mini vMac to a standard USB floppy disk or ZIP drive?
