Writing HFS Floppies With The Help Of Mini Vmac

Writing HFS floppies with the help of MiniVMac Its a known fact, that OSX can not write HFS Standard floppies as of 10.6 and higher. However there is the dd command available in all *nix systems. Unix guys will know. For the others, dd and Terminal can do many useful things, including writing HFS floppies. What is needed: Mac OSX 10.8 or lower. Termial App from Application/Utilities USB floppy drive. Installation of MiniVmac with Mac OS 6.0.8 (or another System of your choice). The dd command seems to be picky when writing files to floppy, so you have to make sure to use a untouched 1440 RAW image. So here we go: 1.) Create a 1440kbyte image with dd like this: Open Terminal and type in Code: dd if=/dev/zero of=/1440.dsk bs=1k count=1440 A file 1440.dsk is created in the root directory of your startup volume.     2.) Start MiniVMac using your boot disk and drag the new 1440.dsk onto MiniVMac´s window.         Select Initialize and Erase in MiniVMac. 3.) Name the volume accordingly (e.g. 1440) and copy the files you want onto it.         Thats it. Close MiniVMac. 4.) Insert a floppy and open DiskUtility. Use the Info button to find out the device ID of your floppy. For this example, lets assume the floppy is disk3. Now select Unmount.                       5.) Go back to Terminal and type in: Code: sudo dd if=/1440.dsk of=/dev/disk3     Because of sudo, you will have to type in your OSX password. The copy process will need some time. As you got a similar output as the above picture, use DiskUtility to eject your floppy, then insert it again.     Done. Your files should show up on floppy! Hope someone will find this useful, especially for transferring files to vintage Macs with HD floppy. Many thanks to all those tinkering with dd, especially to Max1zzz for pointing to RAW and MiniVMac! At last a warning to the casual reader: Though very little can go wrong, if you follow the above to the letter, it is jokingly said that dd stands for "destroy disk" or "delete data", since when used for low-level operations on hard disks, a small mistake such as reversing the input file and output file parameters could result in the loss of some or all data on a disk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)