So, with the new-found knowledge that we can write floppies from
Disk Copy, I decided to use a mac to write boot1.fs and boot2.fs
from i386... and found that Disk Copy only shows boot1.fs in its
"Make a Floppy" dialog.

This might be because boot1.fs is actually floppy-sized while
boot2.fs is about 600 KB, or it might be because Disk Copy is
actually analyzing the content of the file a bit. I have a feeling
that it's the latter, as boot-small.fs (also less that 1440 KB)
doesn't show up either. This confirms that Disk Copy didn't get
smarter, but rather stupider: "Hey, I'll write *any* 1440 KB file
to a disk. If it's not a disk image, that's the user's fault!" Note
that I do NOT disagree with this decision. The software should not
try to be any smarter than that. Ever. It'll get it wrong eventually.
Though it'd be nice if it would pad smaller files out to 1440 KB
and go ahead and write them to a disk.

This is relevant to macppc because if anybody's trying to make a
set of i386 floppies to boot some random old hardware they find,
they can't do it at all on a mac, running MacOS or NetBSD. (Well,
until someone gets around to writing some swim drivers. ;^>) It's
also spooky, since we'd been talking about using ustarfs to split
the floppy in the same way that i386 does. If we do that, we'll have
to make sure we pad out the second disk to 1440 KB, or we'll have to
explain that Disk Copy won't work for the second disk.

Michael, I notice 1.5.1 is actually accessible now, so maybe it's
too late, but if you want to add that at least to the web page. Something
like, "You can use Disk Copy 6.3.3--or earlier? has anyone tried
that?--on MacOS 9 or above, or on MacOS 8 or above if you change
the file and creator types, but only if the file is exactly 1440
KB. If it's smaller, then Disk Copy won't recognize it as a floppy
image."

-- 
       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net