400k Floppies: Copy in DiskCopy OS 8.5

[froggytreafrogg]

Hi, I recently came across some old 400k apple disks. (MacTerminal, MacWrite, and System 1.1) I copy 800k and 1.44 floppies day-in-and-day-out in DiskCopy in Mac OS 8.5. Will DiskCopy copy 400k floppies? BTW I'm doing this on a Mac PowerPC 6400/180. Thanks a bunch.

 

[gmanterry]

DiskCopy

All the programs you listed are unprotected and you should be able to drag and drop copy. It's been so long since I used DiskCopy I can't remember. The disk drives were backward compatible so the disk should show up on your desktop. Just drag the programs to another disk or if you only have one drive, drag to desktop, change disks then drag from desktop to new disk.

Terry

 

[Makosuke]

Wow, DiskCopy--that's a blast from the past. I concur--to my knowledge, if the drive can read 800K Mac floppies it should be able to read 400K ones as well, and presumably software of that vintage should be able to deal with it. Keeping in mind, though, that MacOS 8 or newer is incapable of reading 400K floppies even if the drive is, due to the old format used. There's even, shockingly, still an old Apple support page discussing the limitations:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA47951

The tough part for me is usually finding a functioning Mac floppy drive--as I'm sure you know the differing format makes the disks unreadable on a PC 3.5" drive, and working Mac drives from back then are getting harder and harder to track down.