Disk Tools System Software

The Disk Tools System Software clearly has some special things with it. For one, if you copy it to a hard disk and boot from it, you get a warning about this System Software not being meant for anything but booting from a floppy disk. Additionally, the System file appears to be missing a lot of important stuff that lets you run applications without half of them crashing for strange reasons.

Actual version

I always thought it was weird that the Mac OS 8.0 and 8.1 Disk Tools disks didn't seem to have any of the OS 8 enhancements, such as the multithreaded Finder, yet showed 8.0 and 8.1 in their versions. I fed the System file for Mac OS 8.0 Disk Tools 2 through ResEdit, opened the DSAT ID = 0 resource, and discovered at 0x24C the string "System 7.5.3 needs more memory to start up." The use of a pre-7.6 version is corroborated by the System file on the Disk Tools disk not having any content in its data fork, even though a major change in Mac OS 7.6 is the movement of some shared libraries from the resource fork to the data fork.

Additionally, the vers ID = 1 resource for Finder states the version as 7.5.6DT, implying it is related to Finder 7.5.6 from Mac OS 7.6. Note that the timestamp for the Finder from Mac OS 7.6.1 (Finder version 7.5.6, 515019 bytes) is 1996-12-17, which is after the trimmed 7.5.6DT used by the Mac OS 8.0 Disk Tools.

• Mac OS 8.0 Disk Tools 2 System: created/modified 1997-06-12 12:00:00 PM, 578024 bytes
• Mac OS 8.0 Disk Tools 2 Finder: created/modified 1996-11-26 12:00:00 PM, 388694 bytes

TODO: Look at the 8.1 files and see if anything interesting is there from the addition of HFS+ support but still having the 7.5.x UI