🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi there,

I work at the Design Department of the University of Newcastle, Australia,
where we have over 30 Macs, all with Zip drives.  Since MacOS 8.5, PC/DOS
formatted Zip disks have been causing problems for students.  Previously
with MacOS 8.1 and below it was never a problem.

Symptoms include file lists changing within the Finder, where they can
visibly be seen to change the number of files listed in the top of the
window and the whole list of files seems to jump around.  Using the normal
'Save' command the program will report that it can't find the file to save
to/replace (although Save As... works fine).  Worst still, is that all the
file types and creators can be lost and all the files revert back to the
generic PC file type and creator.  The very worst is that the disk just
gives up the ghost and all the files are lost.

I've never seen this problem mentioned anywhere so I thought it must have
been something specific to how we have our machines set up.  I thought the
cause was MacAdmin, the network client software which is quite buggy (but we
have to use it) however I found the same problems showing up on my
Powerbook.

Can anyone offer any ideas? (And it's no good saying that everyone should
just use HFS formatted disks).  Thanks very much in advance.

- Alex