Apple External Floppy Drive

Which Performa do you have? Either it has a floppy interface on the back (a DB-19, by the way) or you can't hook one of these to it. Only a few Performas had external floppy connectors. There are no adapters to go from anything else to these external floppy drives.

IIRC the only Performa with an external floppy drive port is the Performa 200 (a thinly disguised Classic II).

What is the reason for wanting to do this? I can think of 2.

clearfire62 said:

I want to use my old floppy drive to recover files from my old 800k disks. I have a Performa 6110CD which has a 1.4MB drive. The external drive is the only drive besides my Plus that has 800k drive to read the disks.

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Your performa should be able to read the 800k disks directly. Have you tried popping them in?

Correct forum. You're fine there.

You need to check your 800K floppy only has a single hole (the write protect hole), normally has a sliding switch underneath.

If your 800K floppy has two holes, then it is really a 1.44MB diskette which may have been formatted in an 800K only drive mechanism. I've seen this done. The problem is when you put such a disk in a 1.44MB drive, the drive detects it as a 1.44MB disk and expects it to be formatted as such. If this is the case, you can attempt to read it as an 800K by putting some tape over the top and bottom of the second hole (NOT the write protect hole).

The other cause can be a failure of the 1.44MB detect switch in the drive. When an 800K disk is inserted, the switch is pushed down and closes the detect circuit. If the switch is faulty (dirty, oxidized), then it won't detect the 800K disk. Sometimes a drop of contact cleaner on the white actuator of the switch will work. This runs down the white actuator and into the switch, aiding the contacts to make 'better' contact. I have had situations where I've had to replace the switch.

There are a number of other possibilities like dirty heads. Also, if the data on the disk is important to you, DO NOT "Initialize" the disk. Doing so will erase it.

See the difference in the holes here:
http://floppydisk.com/images/dd_vs_hd.jpg

clearfire62 said:

I thought that 800K and 1.4MB are incompatible, aren't they?

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In any other situation, on any other platform... yes. But any built-in 1.4MB floppy disk drive on Apple hardware is capable of anything from 400k all the way up to 1.4MB.

If you don't mind opening your computer and taking apart the external case, the 20 pin ribbon cable attached to your internal drive will fit the connector on the external drive. If that solves your problem you can copy your files to the HD.

Some Macs (up until the first iMacs) had an "extra" floppy port on the motherboard that you could use for a permanent solution, but I don't know about your Performa—which one is it?