Formatting Floppies (Yes, Floppies!)

[shadowfax0]

How would go about formatting a floppy for a PC on OS X? I knew how t do it in 9, but this is the first time I've had to do it in 2 years!! (And hopefully last! :D )

[Sun Baked]

You need to use Disk Utility application to format disks, even floppies.

[shadowfax0]

I used Disk Utility, but the thing is, I have to first format it as, say UNIX file system, then I can format it again in MS-DOS, which I think is strange, is there any way to just directly do it? I mean it's not so bad, jsut seems a little round about to me...

[Billicus]

Pop the floppy into an old Mac if you have one and do it there, I never could figure it out in OS X, but I don't use them very often, so I'm in luck.

[evildead]

I think that if you format it with Mac OS extended... or what ever its called, it will work on a PC as well... I think.

[Hemingray]

Originally posted by evildead
I think that if you format it with Mac OS extended... or what ever its called, it will work on a PC as well... I think.

HFS+? Really? I've never had such luck. (Of course, it's also been over 4 years since I've even attempted to stick a Mac floppy in a PC drive, soo... :p ) Is this something supposed to be relatively new, like as of Windoze 2000/XP?

[springscansing]

I just wanted to say, that Strong Bad is so freakin sweet. Holy crap!

Also, what the heck man, can't you just email them dang things to yourself or something? :-) Floppies are so... not... good... or something. Something.

RAWR 7:05 I am still awake bwahhahaha.

[BigBurd]

If you're like me, and work with a MIDI file player, you have no choice. You have to format floppies in DOS. In fact, I have to format 720 kb floppies!

Knowing that I was going to have trouble formatting 720 kb floppies in OS X, I also installed OS 9.2 on my hard drive. (In fact, for various reasons, I partitioned my hard drive, and have OS X (Jaguar - 10.2) on one partition and OS 9.2 on the other partition.) So, when I want to format a floppy, I boot up in OS 9.2, then format the disk on my Imation SuperDisk drive.

It would be great if OS X supported a real simple way to do this type of formatting. It would also be great if someone took it upon him/herself to write some sort of 3rd party driver that could be used with OS X on an external floppy drive!

Format on!

[cubist]

... and it only works in Mac OS 9.

You're right about the MIDI equipment, they require DOS format 720K (some can use 1.44 too). Short filenames only, etc.

I think the best plan would be to get an old Mac SE with Ethernet and use it to format and write the floppies.

I could write a formatter, but what hardware would you use? I don't have enough technical info to talk to the VST.

[mcrain]

Originally posted by BigBurd
Format on!

My old office still had to keep an older computer around with a 5 1/4 inch disk because they had many older, but important documents saved on them.

I told them to transfer all the files, but it was taking so long per disk, they stopped.

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by mcrain


My old office still had to keep an older computer around with a 5 1/4 inch disk because they had many older, but important documents saved on them.

I told them to transfer all the files, but it was taking so long per disk, they stopped.

Floppies don't have real long shelf life in some cases so if I were them i would get back to transferring them. That's if the data is critical of course.

[cubist]

After ten years or so, 5" floppies will start having significant errors. After fifteen years, I would expect many to be completely unreadable; after twenty years, you will be lucky if any are readable.

The 8" floppies have "bigger bits" so they'll last a little longer.

MacBandit is absolutely right. Your company should contract out the job on a per-floppy basis if necessary, but get those files off ASAP. You can worry later about what's critical.

[awulf]

In mac os X go to the Disk Utility select the floppy, go to erase and select it as DOS.

To make a HFS disk work in Windoze you need a third party utility. A good one is HFS explorer (it is free)

[firewire2001]

Originally posted by Hemingray


HFS+? Really? I've never had such luck. (Of course, it's also been over 4 years since I've even attempted to stick a Mac floppy in a PC drive, soo... :p ) Is this something supposed to be relatively new, like as of Windoze 2000/XP?

yeah.. you are right.. after all these years, microsoft still hasnt implemented this feature.

you can formatt discs for the DOS format, which is readable in pcs, with the disk utility tool.