Forums | MacLife

Look around for a USB floppy drive. You should be able to pick one up pretty cheap.
Many or most of those disks will be toast but you might get something off them. I have seen data come off plenty of 10 year old disks so who knows?
You might get lucky.

I had trouble getting older floppies to work with a USB floppy drive, especially if they weren't the high density (1.4 MB) disks.  Many of them came up as unrecognized even though they worked fine in older computers.  I'm not sure if it was just that particular drive's lack of support for older disks or what.  I used an older computer with an ethernet port to transfer the files.

Possibly more trouble than it worth but you could get an older Mac with a floppy and ata hard drives and copy the data to drive then but the HDD into an external enclosure.
An older Floppy equipped Mac should have no problem with 800k disks.
I don't ever remember encountering a 400k floppy.

I finally found the time to act Macnuke's suggestion to use a USB floppy drive and had mixed results.  Out of 41 floppies, only 10 were readable and I would still like to get to the 31 I couldn't read with the USB floppy drive.  Luckily, I borrowed the floppy drive...didn't want to fork over $$$ for something I wasn't sure would work.  I may try another brand external floppy (I used a Targus) and see if that might read some of the others.  Thanks for the suggestions!

JoHoNew

Remember that floppies are repairable by disk utilities just like hard drives so you might try that on the unreadable ones. Another option would be to try Data Rescue II and see if that can pull off any files.

I'll give it a shot...
Thanks!

JoHoNew

Mr. T,
     I have a feeling you may be right.  The 31 that are not being recognized by the USB floppy drive attached to an iMac also come up asking to be formatted when I plug the floppy drive into my work PC laptop.  I'm glad I got the 10 disks I did...the rest would be icing on the cake.  Thanks for your reply!

JoHoNew

You might ask around at a local Mac user group. If you're lucky you might find someone with an old portable Mac with a floppy drive who will let you use it to transfer the data to a more current format.

Mr. T wrote:

Anyway, if the disks aren't even being recognized, it's possible that those are the proprietary 800K ones, and not the standard 720K/1.44K kind.

If the floppy has no square hole in the top left corner it is not a 1.4MB and is an 800k floppy so you will need an older Mac to read them. A G3 or older Powerbook with the floppy drive would be an easy way to get the data off the 800k disks.

You'll need a Mac with an internal floppy drive to read any 400 KB, 800 KB, or 1600 KB floppy disk.  Macs used the Integrated Woz Machine (IWM) chip or equivalent to get extra storage space, so

360 KB (PC) => 400 KB (Mac)
720 KB (PC) => 800 KB (Mac)
1440 KB (PC) => 1600 KB (unadvertised Mac format, used by one game I bought)

The external USB drives can read the 360 / 720 / 1440 formats, but not the 400 / 800 / 1600 ones.  (This is referring to just the packing of data onto the disk, not to the filesystem recorded on the disk).

Moving onto filesystems, there are several possibilities:

MFS - A flat file system (folders aren't real) that dates from the very first Mac.  If you have a single-sided 400 KB floppy, chances are it uses MFS.  I think that you need to be running System 7.6.1 or earlier to read a MFS disk.  (So if you have a Mac with a built-in floppy whose minimum System is >= 8.0, you're out of luck, unless you can find someone with an older Mac.)

HFS - Common on 800 KB floppies.  Any Mac with a built-in floppy drive should be able to read any HFS-formatted (or HFS+-formatted; though I don't recall that as an option) floppy.

MS-DOS file system (FAT16) - Common on 1.44 MB floppies.

Could be more trouble than it's worth, but I remedied this problem by adding a USB card to my beige G3 (which had a built in floppy drive).  Just something to think about...

well, the main problem is that mac floppy drives are varible speed, thats how they could fit more info on the disk then pc floppy drives.  and that is why usb floppy drives can't read old mac floppies, and why you need to find an old mac with a floppy drive in it.  its best to get one with ethernet, then you can just add it to your network and copy the files over the wire.  yes, it can be slow, but it works.  i do it all the time with my da g4 and quadra 800.

Mr. T wrote:

I dumped images of the damaged disks for future recovery if needed.
.

I have been wanting to create images of my old floppies and I wonder ... how do you do it?