You could try reading them on an IBM/PC system, Linux normally has good luck reading them.

For Macs, the cheapest one off the block that still works is your best bet. Freecycle might be your friend here if there is one set up in your area.

I'm assuming they're 3.5" disks. If they're DS/DD (one hole), they use a completely proprietary 800k disk format that standard PC floppy drives can't read. If they're DS/HD (two hole) I believe they can be read on any 1.44MB drive. Linux or any OSX Mac with a floppy would be a good bet. You might even be able to get a file system translator for Windows.

(Note: OSX broke floppy support around 10.5 or 10.6 - I've corrupted many disks with a USB drive on my 10.8 Macbook Pro. But *reading* them is usually fine.)

xjas wrote:

I'm assuming they're 3.5" disks. If they're DS/DD (one hole), they use a completely proprietary 800k disk format that standard PC floppy drives can't read.

If they're DS/HD (two hole) I believe they can be read on any 1.44MB drive. Linux or any OSX Mac with a floppy would be a good bet.

Macs running OS X usually don't have a floppy disk drive, but they'll work fine with a USB floppy disk drive (and so will Mac OS version 9.2.2 and earlier with USB support - which probably goes back further than contemporary PCs). However, most current USB floppy disk drives can't read anything else than 1.44 Mb floppies, so if the disks are from before approx. 2000 an old PowerPC Mac running Mac OS 8.x or 9.x with either a build-in floppy drive or a USB drive specific to Macs will be better.
For the files on the disks to be readable on a PC (DOS or Windows, I'm not sure about Linux) they need to be formatted as MS-DOS compatible disks. Otherwise you can only image them.

You might even be able to get a file system translator for Windows.

If the files use a normal file format (e.g. Office for Mac Word), they can be read by the corresponding Windows program (some text format issues may occur). The only problem that is likely is that Macs usually didn't include a file extension in the file name, so determining what program the files were created with without a Mac might be difficult. Instead, files used a resource fork, which on a PC will show up as small separate files with similar names as the data files they belong to. A Windows PC can't read these properly, but they are required to open the files on a Mac.

(Note: OSX broke floppy support around 10.5 or 10.6 - I've corrupted many disks with a USB drive on my 10.8 Macbook Pro. But *reading* them is usually fine.)

Good to know. IIRC it still worked fine on 10.4 (PowerPC).

keenerb wrote:

I'm looking to pick up a machine off of Craigslist or Ebay that could read these, what's my best/cheapest option? I'm thinking one of those garish crayola clamshell mac laptops from the late 90's should be a pretty safe bet.

None of the brightly colored PowerPC-based Macs (be it iMacs, eMacs, iBooks) include a floppy disk drive, nor do the PowerMacs and PowerBooks from the same era, AFAIK. You'll need to pick up a separate USB floppy disk drive (or SuperDrive) to be able to read your floppies, more precisely a model that was made specifically for Macs. If you want a Mac with a build-in floppy disk drive, you'll need to look for a Mac from before those Macs, e.g. a beige Performa series Mac or older PowerBook. Be sure to buy a machine that includes the original install disks *for that machine* (the bundled install disks are machine-specific), or to pick up a retail version that goes with your system. Suggested MacOS versions: Classic MacOS 8.2 or later, no later than OS X 10.4.11.

Avoid Intel-based Macs (basically everything after 2005).

Good Mac reference site: http://www.everymac.com/

This site has a good rundown of Mac floppy formats and in/compatibilities with the various iterations of Mac OS(X). From the looks of it, if you have 1.44MB disks there's a 95% chance you'll be able to read them on any Linux machine with a floppy drive, Linux supports HFS and HFS+ regardless of what kind of disk it's on (at least for read-only access.) 800k DS/DD disks are another story.

xjas wrote:

(Note: OSX broke floppy support around 10.5 or 10.6 - I've corrupted many disks with a USB drive on my 10.8 Macbook Pro. But *reading* them is usually fine.)

That's evil. I hope MS doesn't pull a similar stunt someday.

Errius wrote:

xjas wrote:

(Note: OSX broke floppy support around 10.5 or 10.6 - I've corrupted many disks with a USB drive on my 10.8 Macbook Pro. But *reading* them is usually fine.)

That's evil. I hope MS doesn't pull a similar stunt someday.

They did.

With drivers.

Which they changed

AGAIN.

^^ To be fair I don't think it was on purpose. 10.8 is supposed to have full R/W support for FAT floppies (read only on HFS/+ because why, Apple, why???) but because of the way Finder overzealously takes over any file system it encounters and vomits fake resource forks all over it I've had problems. I usually end up write protecting a floppy if I need to read it on my Macbook.

Microsoft was one of the big conspirators in deliberately killing serial ports, parallel ports, and ISA slots, so there's that. 😜

Because ISA was useless right around the time the early 486 chips came about. That's why the whole stopgap VLB thing came into play.

16bit x 4.77 mhz means it's less than 1/12th as fast as PCI, and IRQ issues are common.

It's an older program that has a few bugs from my experience, but I've had good luck reading Mac-formatted floppies on Windows using a free program called HFVExplorer. I've only used it with 1.4MB disks though, I have no Mac-formatted 800K disks to try with it. IIRC it also supposedly works with Mac-formatted Zip disks, or really any removable disk in a "Classic Mac" format that Windows can't natively read. But, as I said, I personally have only ever used it to read 1.4MB Mac floppies.

http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/hfvexplorer

torindkflt wrote:

I've only used it with 1.4MB disks though, I have no Mac-formatted 800K disks to try with it.

Standard PC floppy hardware is fundamentally incapable of reading 800K Mac floppies. The same applies to Amiga floppies.

There is a program called DISK2FDI which exploits a "feature" of systems with two floppy drives to read non-standard formats, but it looks like they are recommending the use of a "Disk2FDI cable" with the current version. In any case, for the price of registration, you can probably find an old Mac instead.
http://disk2fdi.joguin.com/featreq.html

Jorpho wrote:

Standard PC floppy hardware is fundamentally incapable of reading 800K Mac floppies. The same applies to Amiga floppies. […]
Show full quote

torindkflt wrote:

I've only used it with 1.4MB disks though, I have no Mac-formatted 800K disks to try with it.

Standard PC floppy hardware is fundamentally incapable of reading 800K Mac floppies. The same applies to Amiga floppies.

There is a program called DISK2FDI which exploits a "feature" of systems with two floppy drives to read non-standard formats, but it looks like they are recommending the use of a "Disk2FDI cable" with the current version. In any case, for the price of registration, you can probably find an old Mac instead.
http://disk2fdi.joguin.com/featreq.html

This is what grinds my gears with PC floppy drives. They can't read squat.

But a COOL exploit is if you have the Commodore 1571, you can directly write CP/M compatible MFM formatted diskettes using an IBM PC since it's the same, but you can use a 1541 since it only supports GCR.

Either way, I say your best bet is to either find someone with an old mac and pay them 10 bucks for you to pop in and transfer the files to something more PC readable, or to just look around computing tat holes for a cheap or freebie 68k Mac.

Ampera wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

Standard PC floppy hardware is fundamentally incapable of reading 800K Mac floppies. The same applies to Amiga floppies. […]
Show full quote

torindkflt wrote:

I've only used it with 1.4MB disks though, I have no Mac-formatted 800K disks to try with it.

Standard PC floppy hardware is fundamentally incapable of reading 800K Mac floppies. The same applies to Amiga floppies.

There is a program called DISK2FDI which exploits a "feature" of systems with two floppy drives to read non-standard formats, but it looks like they are recommending the use of a "Disk2FDI cable" with the current version. In any case, for the price of registration, you can probably find an old Mac instead.
http://disk2fdi.joguin.com/featreq.html

This is what grinds my gears with PC floppy drives. They can't read squat.

AFAIK, the problem really is more recently produced floppy disk drives (last 10-15 years). Older floppy disk drives made in the 1980s-90s can usually read and write single and double density floppies and also non-standard formats using special utilities or drivers, but the support required was removed from later floppy disk drives.

What about USB floppy drives released when the iMac first came out? Are they physically capable of reading 800K Mac floppies? I would theoretically assume so since, at the time, the iMac was the only mainstream consumer system to not have a floppy drive when there was still high demand for them. I would presume then that any of the very first generation USB floppy drives would be designed for maximum Mac compatibility.

If a first-gen iMac USB floppy drive can read 800K floppies, the next question then is...do those drives work on modern Macs, or on any version of Windows to allow HFVExplorer to access them?

Or, how about a USB SuperDisk 120MB drive? Those can read floppy disks too...but can they read 800K Mac disks? Just tossing out some other ideas as they come to mind to see if anything sticks.

yawetaG wrote:

AFAIK, the problem really is more recently produced floppy disk drives (last 10-15 years). Older floppy disk drives made in the 1980s-90s can usually read and write single and double density floppies and also non-standard formats using special utilities or drivers, but the support required was removed from later floppy disk drives.

I was not aware that there had been any such profound shift in floppy hardware, though there does seem to be some consensus that they might not be built as well as they used to be. I unfortunately do not have a floppy drive made in the last 10-15 years with which to test.

In any case, an 800k Mac floppy is fundamentally different from a 720k PC floppy, and with the possible exception of Disk2FDI, I am not aware of any software that was ever capable of reading an 800k Mac floppy with any kind of standard PC hardware. (Things like the Kryoflux and Catweasel would be "non-standard".) This is all very well-documented; apparently an external Mac USB drive won't help either.
http://siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.html
http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/most-mode … oppies.1653835/

Jorpho wrote:

I was not aware that there had been any such profound shift in floppy hardware, though there does seem to be some consensus that […]
Show full quote

yawetaG wrote:

AFAIK, the problem really is more recently produced floppy disk drives (last 10-15 years). Older floppy disk drives made in the 1980s-90s can usually read and write single and double density floppies and also non-standard formats using special utilities or drivers, but the support required was removed from later floppy disk drives.

I was not aware that there had been any such profound shift in floppy hardware, though there does seem to be some consensus that they might not be built as well as they used to be. I unfortunately do not have a floppy drive made in the last 10-15 years with which to test.

In any case, an 800k Mac floppy is fundamentally different from a 720k PC floppy, and with the possible exception of Disk2FDI, I am not aware of any software that was ever capable of reading an 800k Mac floppy with any kind of standard PC hardware. (Things like the Kryoflux and Catweasel would be "non-standard".) This is all very well-documented; apparently an external Mac USB drive won't help either.
http://siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.html
http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/most-mode … oppies.1653835/

Damn straight. Almost all of my 5.25 inch diskettes are working fine, but I have PILES of 3.5 inch floppies that I thankfully backed up before they decided they didn't like the concept of living anymore.

For those 800K floppies for my Macintosh SE 30, I had to buy a separate PowerPC Macintosh Performa with CD-ROM and floppy (for 800K and 1.44mb Mac formatted) JUST to make floppy images and backup disks for my old Macintosh SE 30 software. A pain...yes. (mac keyboard, mac mouse, mac VGA converter, new hard drive, new RAM, etc).

Fun...yes. Sort of....lots of work!

Would it be possible that an external parallel floppy drive could possibly do the trick?
There was this backpack external floppy drive and it's simply an external housing with an internal floppy drive which can be replaced with another internal one.

Jorpho wrote:

There is a program called DISK2FDI which exploits a "feature" of systems with two floppy drives to read non-standard formats, but it looks like they are recommending the use of a "Disk2FDI cable" with the current version.

Hey, I remember this one. I used this one to backup the Amiga version of Magnetic Scrolls' Wonderland.
I think I've got still a photo of that setup somewhere. I used a standard floppy cable, btw.

Edit: Found it.