I have a Mac 800K 3.5" floppy and some 5.25" floppy that need transferring. Can you recommend a company that does this?
Any idea why Teac FD-55GFR cannot read some floppies? What format would it be?
"My Greaseweazle Transfer Service" would probably be the cheapest option, I'm sure there's plenty of info out there on how to both read and write these floppies. My understanding is the main issue is the multi-speed drive, I suppose that can be worked around in software for reading but probably not for writing. So a Mac floppy drive might be needed for this job.
As for Teac not reading floppies - well, what kind of floppies? DOS formatted? DD or HD? My first guess would be bad alignment on the Teac, or the drive that wrote the floppies. Can be corrected but it's a job for patient people (preferably with steady hands or extra patient) and requires a scope if it's to be done right.
I googled "My Greaseweazle Transfer Service", nothing came up. Do you have the website? The TEAC drives reads other 5.25" floppies fine so the problem is with the pictured floppies, either it's bad or unsupported format.
he meant splurging whole $40 on https://decromancer.ca/greaseweazle/ and doing it yourself
https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-disk FM/MFM/RLL decoder
https://github.com/raszpl/FIC-486-GAC-2-Cache-Module (AT&T Globalyst)
https://github.com/raszpl/386RC-16 ram board
https://github.com/raszpl/440BX Reference Design adapted to Kicad
I'm sorry, that was tongue-in-cheek - search for Greaseweazle (and KryoFlux - but that is more expensive, GW does the same job with open-source software).
Did you try copying these floppies with DOS diskcopy? Or making an image with IMD for example? Could be these old floppies are booters and don't containg a DOS-readable filesystem.
Is there a list of 3.5" drives that supports 800K disks? I found this website, price seems reasonable. https://retrofloppy.com/
Depends on what you mean by "support" - AFAIK no ordinary Shugart-like drive (PC/Amiga/etc) has CLV-ish operation used on the traditional Mac 400/800K formats per se, but with the right FDC capable of "variable bitrate" (and these low-level disk copiers generally do count, AFAIK, because by their nature they have to sample much faster than what's needed for PC-standard DD/HD/ED disks) the data stream gets sped up/slowed down for a comparable result 😀
Any recommendations of which model 3.5" drive to get?
I have a few Mac's but none with 5.25" floppy (never wanted one that old 🤣) but also have a Macally USB floppy that can read 800k and HD Mac disks as well as PC disks.....
Have used it with appropriate software to dupe some Mac 3.5" disks but has been a while, will look for my notes....
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
Horun wrote on 2023-07-22, 02:59:I have a few Mac's but none with 5.25" floppy
Because they dont exist 🤣
