[comp.sys.mac] Stupid Installer program

spencer@eecs.umich.edu (Spencer W. Thomas) (03/10/89)

I'm sure somebody else has bitched about this before, but the problem
has still not been fixed.  Here is my situation:  I am trying to build
a clean "boot" floppy on a 1 floppy Mac.  The "obvious" way to do this
is to use the installer, so that I don't get any unnecessary resources
in my system file.  However, whoever wrote the Installer obviously
didn't have his brain in gear, because it installs things *ONE
RESOURCE AT A TIME*.  That means a disk swap for every one of the
(hundreds of?) resources in the system file.  This is an asinine way
to do things.  How about reading as many resources as possible at one
time from the source disk, then writing all of them to the
destination?  Should be able to complete in just a few swaps this way.
It could probably do even better with the "computing sizes" pass.
This requires fewer swaps, but still too many (should be able to do 1
pass over the master disk and 1 pass over the destination disk).

Will this problem ever be fixed, or should I resign myself to finding
a two floppy Mac whenever I want to make a new boot disk?

=Spencer (spencer@eecs.umich.edu)

pryals@cohesive.UUCP (Phil Ryals) (03/18/89)

In article <SPENCER.89Mar10104026@spline.eecs.umich.edu> spencer@eecs.umich.edu (Spencer W. Thomas) writes:
> [the stupid installer] installs things *ONE
>RESOURCE AT A TIME*.  That means a disk swap for every one of the
>(hundreds of?) resources in the system file.  This is an asinine way
>to do things. ......
>
>Will this problem ever be fixed, or should I resign myself to finding
>a two floppy Mac whenever I want to make a new boot disk?

I recently ran into the same problem trying to build a "minimum" system for a
one-drive Mac+ using the installer.  My solution was to install an 800K RAM
disk, do the installer build on it, then copy the contents of the RAM disk to
a floppy.  This should probably work with a smaller RAM disk if only 1MB of RAM
is available, so long as there's enough space for the size of system you are
building.