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