Fake a Floppy That Holds GIGABYTES of "Data"

The venerable 3.5” diskette has become a relic of the past. In high school I remember using them daily to store my documents, images, even some games. Now, system builders will only offer them as an optional peripheral, if at all, in their new computers.

With this little hack you can give that humble little 3.5" disk gathering dust in your closet new life, messing with your friends’ heads a bit in the process. To accomplish this, we use a disk editor to fool Windows into thinking that its file sizes are far from normal!

Stuff you'll need:

• Windows 2000 / XP / Vista
• 3.5" disk drive
• 3.5" diskette
• a disk editor like Norton DiskEdit

According to this site, your typical 1.44MB, 3.5” floppy can hold up to 224 files in its root directory. What we’ll do first is create 224 tiny text files using a simple batch file.

Create a batch file containing the following line of text in a folder on your C:\ drive, let’s say C:\TEMP. Name the file "MakeFile.BAT" or whatever you like.

 FOR /L %%G IN (1, 1, 224) DO ECHO I'm file number %%G. > A:\%%G.txt

Next, open a Command Prompt, change to C:\TEMP, and execute the batch file. After a few minutes, you’ll have 224 separate little .TXT files on the diskette.

Now you need to find a disk editor, which allows you to edit data on a diskette or most any other media at the bit level. For this example I use Norton DiskEdit, a very old but still useful sector editor.

Find yourself a copy of the executable, DISKEDIT.EXE, and save it to C:\TEMP, and then type DISKEDIT and hit Enter. If you’re using Windows 2000 or XP, you’ll likely encounter the following error:

“An application has attempted to directly access an incompatible diskette format, which cannot be supported. This may cause the application to function incorrectly. Choose ‘Close’ to terminate the application.”


We won’t be looking at the hard drive, so for purposes of this example you can safely click Ignore. From there you should arrive at the main DISKEDIT screen.



My system isn’t rendering this old DOS application’s fonts properly in windowed mode, but regardless you can use the arrow keys to ensure that the ‘3½” floppy’ and ‘Logical disks’ entries are selected and in red. Then, move to highlight the OK button and hit Enter to proceed.

Your diskette drive should whir for a few moments, and one great feature of DISKEDIT will make itself apparent. The next screen will bring you to the FAT of the disk, listing the files you created above.



Now, move the black cursor so that it’s hovering under the Size column on the first row, you can use the arrow keys but hitting TAB will be quicker. Type 9999999999 (ten 9s), and then tap the down arrow to move to the next row. You’ll notice that the file size changes from a humble two digits to a value of 1,410,065,407 which is roughly 1.4 gigabytes.

You can proceed to change the sizes of each of the remaining files, from 220 to 11 as listed above. When you tap the arrow key past the last file, you’ll get prompted to Write, Discard, or Review your changes. Arrow over so that Write is selected, then hit Enter.



Since DISKEDIT is open, it’s got exclusive access to your diskette. To view our handiwork so far, close the program, and then navigate to the diskette in Windows Explorer. The sixteen files we just modified now show themselves as taking up 21 GB of space.



You can either manually update the size of each file, or use a tool like the excellent (and open-source) AutoHotKey to speed up the process.

In the end, you’ll have a disk which, on the surface, says it’s got around 294 GB of data, but which in actuality contains just a tiny fraction.


Some caveats:

• The files themselves will be unusable. Try to open them in Notepad, for example, and Windows will complain they're too big.
  
  
• Changes you save to the files will override this hack. Save and overwrite any of the files and they'll revert to their plain old file size according to the file system rules.
  
  
• The fake file size can go beyond 1,410,065,407 bytes apiece. Due to a quirk in Norton Diskedit, instead of ten 9s, you could input ten 7s and have each file be around 3.4 GB instead. I just chose the 9s arbitrarily because 9 is just, well, special. That's all, nothing else. Different disk editors may yield different results, and flexibility.
  
  
• This trick won't fool p2p file sharing programs. I tried a few open-source variants using the DC++ protocol and each balked at the disk, wanting to have Windows run CHKDSK to fix the "errors". You'll just have to share those 500 GB of data the hard way to gain access to those l33t servers in Sweden, unless you know of a way to "cloak" the diskette's true nature from the application and the operating system.
  

No Internet After Installing Vista SP2

I'd just noticed Vista service pack 2 had become available via Automatic Updates, and decided to take the plunge and update my Lenovo N100 laptop.

Upon rebooting, I was able to connect to other XP machines on my LAN, but not the internet.



I found a helpful newsgroup post where some other users described similar woes following the update, including links to a variety of workarounds for a variety of situations. My laptop connects to the router with a static IP, so cases where DHCP mysteriously failed to acquire an address didn't apply to me. I also don't keep my router on a different subnet, so another possibility gone.

Fortunately, in my case I was just able to uninstall my wireless network adapter, in this case a Broadcom BCM43XG, and have Vista reinstall it.

PROCEDURE

1. Open Device Manager by holding the Windows key and then hitting the Pause key, then clicking the Device Manager link in the upper left corner of the Control Panel => System screen. Alternatively, you can open it using one of the methods outlined here.
   
   
2. Expand the Network Adapters category in the device list, and then right-click on your wireless network adapter (in my case, its display name is listed as "Broadcom 802.11 Network Adapter"), click Uninstall, and then click OK to confirm. If prompted to remove the device driver associated with the network adapter, do not do so. In this case Vista is the problem, not the device driver.
   
   
3. Right-click the entry at the very top of the device list (indicated by your computer's name) and click "Scan for hardware changes". Vista will find and reconfigure the wireless network adapter and should shortly inform you that it's ready for action.
   
   
4. Use either Vista's built-in wireless network management tools, or a third-party utility (in my case, ThinkVantage Access Connections 5), to reconfigure your wireless connection properties (if you aren't already using a wireless security protocol like WPA, I strongly suggest you implement it).
   
   

Given the myriad of notebook and wireless configurations out there, it's not at all surprising that a given configuration will not emerge completely intact from a typical Windows service pack install.

In this case, I think that whatever particulars about the configuration of my wireless network adapter, which incidentally has remained much the same since before Vista service pack 1, introduced a monkey wrench which shot out my adapter's knees under service pack 2.

By uninstalling the adapter and then reinstalling it under the updated "device bureaucracy" of Vista service pack 2, this allowed Vista and the adapter to happily coexist once more.

FIREFOX: Hogs memory better than Internet Explorer.

Transferring Files from an OLD Mac to a PC

A friend of mine gave me his ancient Mac PowerBook 140 and asked me if I could possibly transfer some document files to the PC platform.

"Sure!" I replied, enthusiastically. Little did I know the ordeal that was to come. Now, at least, I've learned from it and can spread the word to other PC people who might've had a Mac dropped in their midst.

I plugged in the old PowerBook's clunky AC adapter and eventually found the power switch on the left-rear panel. The cheesy "BOM BOMMMMM…" greeting tone came through, so far, so good. A grayscale image eventually flickered into view.

I don't know whether the display was responding to solar flares, unclean power, or sketchy connectors from the motherboard to the screen, but it took some effort to get the image to remain stable. The backlight appeared to be on its way out, like one of those ubiquitous fluorescent bulbs in a school or office that's started its death flickers. My initial idea was simply to offload the documents via the PowerBook's 3.5" diskette drive, so caveman-like, I grabbed up a handy diskette, plenty of which I have gathering dust in my desk drawer, and managed to single-click my way to formatting the diskette.

Sadly this was nixed by what the Mac reported as at least several dozen MB of documents and images on its hard drive. Worse, neither network nor USB nor writeable CD were an option with this old Mac.

Undaunted, I flipped off the PowerBook in disgust, then unplugged the sucker and let it sit on a table in my room while other more pressing, and interesting, things took up my time.

Weeks, then months, passed by. Yesterday I revisit the PowerBook, now a fine layer of dust and dog hair adorning its gray exterior. I pick it up and notice the power plug sticking out of the right-rear panel is askew for some reason. I yank the plug out and the metal sleeve is bent at around a 45-degree angle. Whoops! I probably carelessly bumped into it at some point, popping the thing.


I try plugging the AC adapter in, then try carefully squeezing the sleeve back into place, and try working it around like a Q-Tip™ to see if I can get any power. Nope. I try realigning the sleeve again and notice that it's for naught, because the sleeve has been completely sheared away from the rest of the plug assembly.

Clearly if I'm going to get power to this clunker, I need to replace the plug. I dig around my collection of old and unused AC adapters, refugees from years of electronics equipment gone astray, lost to lightning strikes, or given away or sold with the wrong adapter in the package, separating the two forever.

I find one possible candidate, an old AC adapter from a 2400 baud modem, with a similarly shaped plug. I slice off the plug, slice away the broken Apple plug, and splice the replacement, then apply power. No dice!

Frustrated, I start digging around in a drawer where I keep anything from old greeting cards to duct tape to spare change. I find a strip of plugs from a universal AC adapter which has gone AWOL, each has two metal pins which are meant to plug in to a socket in the adapter’s cable. At this point I don’t care about a clean fit, so I grab the largest of the plugs and then go ahead and strip the wires from the Apple adapter and solder them to the pins. Incidentally, I have no idea off hand which is positive and which is negative, but as it happens when I get frustrated, I get impatient, so I opted to take the 50/50 shot at blowing something up.

Success, the annoying "BOM BOMMMMM…" smacks my eardrums!

Now I start poking around on the Mac to try to gather up all the files and compress them. Documents in general are notoriously compressible, so I figure I can get at least a good 70-80% compression on average. The problem, unlike Windows XP, with its default “Send to Compressed File” context menu option from Explorer, this System 7.0.1 doesn’t seem to have any way to compress files, let alone right-click. There is a StuffIt Expander 4.0.1 installed, but it only uncompresses.

Unperturbed, I set out in search of a compression utility. I checked out the latest version of StuffIt, but it requires the latest and greatest MacOS. I took a quick look, they didn’t seem to have download links for prior versions readily available. I searched around and found references to DropStuff 4.0.1, StuffIt Expander’s counterpart, which would enable me to gasp compress files and folders.

Of course, the StuffIt site didn’t have this file available, so I visited some FTP search sites, ending up finally at FileWatcher. A forum thread I came upon actually had a post where a user had mentioned the name of an .HQX file, dropstuff_w_ee_4_installer.hqx, which is basically the equivalent of a SETUP.EXE file in Windows. This is what I needed.

FileWatcher provided me with a suitable FTP site hosting the file, so I grabbed it, and on a freshly-formatted diskette, copied the .HQX file. I then inserted the diskette into the Mac’s drive and attempted to execute what should be an executable. I get this error message:

The document could not be opened because the application program that created it could not be found.

So let me get this straight, it’s an executable which can’t be executed, because the Mac tried and failed to find an application associated with it? Strange, too, was the fact that the DropStuff installer icon itself was plain, as if symbolic of an unknown file type. Did the Mac just not know what to do with this file? Did I grab a version of DropStuff which somehow was unreadable by this version of the System OS?

I decided to fall back and punt. I took a break, got a tasty beverage, then did some more research. It turned out that I had naively taken a blurb I’d heard years ago about Macs being able to read PC-formatted disks too seriously. It turned out not to work quite so seamlessly.

Eventually I found and installed the handy utility TransMac which enables Mac and PC files to be transferred from their respective media. Once I used this utility to create a Mac-formatted diskette on my PC, then copied the DropStuff installer to it, I found to my relief that when I inserted the diskette into the Mac, its own pixellated little icon appeared. When I clicked twice on the icon, an installer opened and began the installation process. At last, I was able to use DropStuff to systematically grab and compress my pal Don’s documents, copy them to diskette, and with TransMac as my Mac-to-PC ambassador, copy the resulting .SIT files to a folder on my PC.

I finally found and installed an old but Windows-compatible version 5 of the StuffIt suite to enable me to uncompress the document files on my Windows machine and migrate them to a writeable CD.

PROCEDURE

1. Install TransMac on the Windows computer.

2. Use TransMac to format a Mac diskette.

3. Locate a file with an .HQX extension for a Mac version of DropStuff or a similar compression utility.

4. Copy the .HQX file to diskette using TransMac.

5. Install DropStuff on the Mac.

6. Use DropStuff to compress files and folders, and copy them from Mac to diskette.

7. Copy files from diskette to PC using TransMac.

8. Install a Windows version of StuffIt, and use this to uncompress the .SIT files containing the migrated document files.

Aside from the PowerBook’s annoying lack of a simple eject button to pop the diskette out of the Mac, instead depending on the quaint user interface option of “Put Away” to get it back, things went pretty smoothly! Now this Mac can go into the dark night of the technology graveyard as many things have and will continue to do.