Today’s question comes from inSync reader Chad G: “I own a Yamaha CD-R400 and Toast CD-ROM Pro which I regularly make CD-ROMs and audio CDs from. Is there a way to create a disk image of my ESI-32 formatted Zip disks (or floppies) without the Mac Finder trying to mount the disks (which it obviously can’t do) so I can burn a CD-ROM of my ESI sounds?”
For the answer we went to our walking encyclopedia, Bruce Hendrix. As usual he had the solution before we were even finished asking the question: The way I have found to achieve non standard file formats (ex: E-mu, Kurzweil, Akai) is to use the SCSI COPY option in Toast’s FORMAT menu. This will allow you to make a exact copy of the source disk on to a CD-ROM. You need to hook your CD-R and your Zip drive to your Mac’s SCSI buss, run Toast and select SCSI COPY. Click on “data” and select the Zip drive by double clicking the on it. The next step is to burn a CD as normal. This method works great but it has a couple limitations: You will only be using 100 meg of the CD-R and you can not copy disks larger than 640 meg. I personally keep a 540 meg drive around so that I use when I need to make a backups of my Kurzweil files.
Editor’s note: If anyone has any proven ideas about how to solve either of these limitations, or other ways to achieve these results, we’d love to hear from you.