Disk Copy

Disk Copy

Developer(s)	Apple Computer
Stable release	10.2
Operating system	System Software 6, System 7, Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X v10.0, Mac OS X v10.1, Mac OS X v10.2
Type	disk image emulator

Disk Copy was the default utility for handling disk images in System 7 through Mac OS X 10.2 (Usable in System Software 6 as well). In later versions of Mac OS X it has been replaced by DiskImageMounter for mounting the images and Disk Utility for creating them.

Although the last official public release of Disk Copy for Mac OS 9 was version 6.3.3, there was to be a version 6.5 that supported the newer DMG image format introduced with Mac OS X. But because Apple had stopped support for OS 9 already, support for the old OS was eventually removed in favour of OS X. As such the OS 9 version of 6.5 only ever made it to beta 13 before development on it stopped. There was also a developer version 6.4 that 6.5 was based on and had most of the same functionality, but as a developer version it was never released. Although version 6.4 and 6.5 will read DMG images when the system is booted into OS 9, they can only do so if the image is not compressed.

Disk Copy was also the name of an Apple utility distributed with some of the earliest version of the Mac OS. In order to copy 400K floppy disks using as few disk swaps as possible on a machine with only 128K of RAM, the original Disk Copy used the screen buffer to store binary data from the disk being copied; as a result, the screen (other than a small area at the bottom displaying the GUI) filled with noise while copying was in progress.

Supported image formats

• Disk Copy
• Disk Copy 4.2
• DiskSet
• PC drive container
• raw disk image

See also

• DiskImageMounter — The Mac OS X 10.3 and later successor.
• Disk Utility — Creates disk images in Mac OS X 10.3 and later.
• RaWrite and RaWrite2 for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows
• dd (Unix)