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macOS & 3.5" Floppies...

DeeAnn

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 16, 2021
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63
Location
Cathedral City, California
I understand that Apple killed OS support for floppies long ago. However, are there any modern day solutions for Catalina, Big Sur or Monterey? The reason is that I have a ton of ancient software that I want to archive...
 
I have used a USB 3 1/2" floppy drive on my 2013 iMac with no problems in the past. I must admit though that I haven't used it recently since we have upgraded both the machine and OS to the latest.

Dave
 
The latest OSX versions don't support HFS formats on floppies, only HFS+. That abandons just about all the early 90s Mac floppies. There are a few tools to read HFS floppies on Catalina or later but I haven't used them so I will let someone else recommend one.

Are any of the floppies double density (400 or 800K)? USB floppy drives can not read those disks.
 
The latest OSX versions don't support HFS formats on floppies, only HFS+. That abandons just about all the early 90s Mac floppies. There are a few tools to read HFS floppies on Catalina or later but I haven't used them so I will let someone else recommend one.
But that should still allow simply using dd in a Terminal to make an image of the disk, shouldn't it? It's not needed for that that the OS mounts the disk or understands the file system.
 
If they're the old 400 or 800K floppies, you'll need the period-correct hardware and software to read them. My Performa 6100 and beige G3 can read the 800K ones just fine when running MacOS 9, but AFAIK, no USB drive can--very different modulation scheme. You may have to resort to a different (PC-based) solution, such as a Fluxengine, Greaseweazle, Kyroflux or Catweasel. I know that the Central Point Deluxe Option Board can read those, but those are hard to find, require an ISA slot and are as old as the 400K floppies themselve.
 
I've read some 800K floppies with kryoflux, but it seems to be picky about the drive that is used. I've had it read halfway through and then start kicking out errors, but another drive reads the second half fine, so I've sometimes used two drive to read one floppy. Some drive seem to not work well at all.

I've wondered if the applesauce kit, using a real Apple drive would have better results.
 
Actually, I don't know for sure. The floppies are basically from late 80's to mid-90's, so it is entirely that they either 400k or 800k...
Low density (400k/800k) disks will not have the density notch on them. (The notch opposite of the write protect notch).

In Windows one can make images of Macintosh high density 1.44mb disks using WinImage and then the images can be fed to emulators or other disk tools to read the files. Aside from the "dd" command line program, I am not familiar with any similar tool for current Macintosh.
 
If you're dealing with 400/800k disks, and you're wanting to archive lots of them, one of the purpose built solutions like applesauce, kryoflux, ****weasle would be best, if you just have a couple disks, it may be best to just send them to someone else to archive, the cost for some of those archival devices is pretty high.
Another option would be get a "bridge" Mac, I use a Beige G3, last machine to have a 400/800k capable floppy (though it wont work with OSX, need to run Classic), it's new enough to have ethernet and be able to talk to an Appletalk or FTP server. Really though almost any beige Mac with a built-in floppy and ethernet could be made to work as a bridge Mac.
 
macOS Monterrey supports USB floppy drives just fine but it hasn’t supported reading hfs since 10.14 Mojave or writing since Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. You’ll have to use an emulator like Mini vMac or Basilisk II to archive your hfs floppy images or use an older version of macOS. For old floppies you’ll want something like DiskCopy 4.2 to copy the images to files.
 
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