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Reading Old Floppies
- Thread starter iwerken
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I believe the older 400K and 800K Mac floppy disk formats are simply not readable with modern USB floppy drives. Herb Johnson (a dealer in vintage Mac hardware) has a short writeup about the subject here: http://retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/mactopc.txt. Essentially, the hardware in USB floppy drives (which are almost always designed to read the 1.4M format) is physically incapable of reading the 400K/800K format (it's not just a software incompatibility issue).
If you want to retrieve files from the older floppies, you may have to set up an older Mac with a 400K/800K floppy drive as a "bridge" between the two formats (either by also attaching a 1.4M floppy drive to that Mac, or by networking that Mac to your newer machine and sending the files over the LAN). I'm not really familiar with the PowerBook 145b you mentioned, but hopefully at least one of those approaches will work with it.
Sorry I don't have a better answer for you. :-\
-Frank
If you want to retrieve files from the older floppies, you may have to set up an older Mac with a 400K/800K floppy drive as a "bridge" between the two formats (either by also attaching a 1.4M floppy drive to that Mac, or by networking that Mac to your newer machine and sending the files over the LAN). I'm not really familiar with the PowerBook 145b you mentioned, but hopefully at least one of those approaches will work with it.
Sorry I don't have a better answer for you. :-\
-Frank
Are there old files you are looking for? Or what exactly is on the disks that you need? Cause you can probably find a copy of whatever on the net. If not, You might have to get creative with an old Mac and a network solution. One word: Appletalk. Good luck.
The other posters are correct that 400K and 800K floppies are simply not readable on USB floppy drives. The way I went about getting data off of old 800K floppies is by transferring the contents to Zip disks using my Mac II. There is support for SCSI Zip drives all the way back to System 6 (which is what is on my Mac II) and the resultant Zip disks work fine in a USB Zip drive.
Us older apple collectors never have this problem, with a classic mac connected to our network 
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If the data is highly important, you may want to look into getting an older 68k system like a quadra, or something similar on eBay for dirt cheap, preferably with an OS and built in ethernet.
.If the data is highly important, you may want to look into getting an older 68k system like a quadra, or something similar on eBay for dirt cheap, preferably with an OS and built in ethernet.