Floppy Disks in Mac OS X

[Hildron101010]

I have a USB floppy drive for my Mac and I have no problems reading files off of old disks that I share with my old Macintosh computers. However, I cannot ever write to any of the disks. I have tried all formats I could in Disk Utility, and they all failed, or hung the application. After 15 minutes of no response, I force quit Disk Utility. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to write files to floppy disks in Mac OS X but still have the disk compatible with a Macintosh running an older version of the Mac OS?

 

[McGiord]

Currently I am away from my Mac, so what I am going to suggest might not be fully detailed. For running minivMac or sheepshaver there are some disk images out there and a software that allows you to create, read and write old Mac OS disk images, therefore I believe that you can use them to accomplish what you want. What old Mac models are you using? OS?

Google that.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

What format are those floppy disks using?
And have you verified, that you haven't enabled write protection on the floppy disks?

from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/W/write_protect.html​

 

[r0k]

I have a USB floppy drive for my Mac and I have no problems reading files off of old disks that I share with my old Macintosh computers. However, I cannot ever write to any of the disks. I have tried all formats I could in Disk Utility, and they all failed, or hung the application. After 15 minutes of no response, I force quit Disk Utility. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to write files to floppy disks in Mac OS X but still have the disk compatible with a Macintosh running an older version of the Mac OS?

Do the older macs have usb or ethernet? A memory stick or network might be a better way to move files around than dealing with floppies. I'm pretty sure OS X can read and write FAT on any media. If you got a FAT utility to read FAT formatted floppies on your older Macs, you would now be able to read and write the floppies on both the new and the older machines.

 

[Hildron101010]

The disks that are formatted usually can't be read. When they can be, I usually can't write to them. And when I can write to them, sometimes it takes FOREVER! Usually the Finder completely freezes up and then I relaunch it, but I get the -10810 error. The system I plan to use the disks on are a Macintosh Color Classic running System 7.5, and a Power Macintosh 6100 running System 7.5.3 and soon to run Mac OS 8.

Currently I am away from my Mac, so what I am going to suggest might not be fully detailed. For running minivMac or sheepshaver there are some disk images out there and a software that allows you to create, read and write old Mac OS disk images, therefore I believe that you can use them to accomplish what you want. What old Mac models are you using? OS?

Google that.

I plan on using the disk on System 7.5.x. Most likely on a Macintosh Color Classic. But sometimes I can get the disk to have files written to it after I format it in a Windows system. But that usually causes the Finder to completely die. And by die, I mean it gives me the dreaded -10810 error.

 

[MisterMe]

The disks that are formatted usually can't be read. ...

Which file system are these disks formatted for? If they are formatted for HFS+, then they cannot be read by any OS that is older than MacOS 8.1.

 

[Hildron101010]

Format

Which file system are these disks formatted for? If they are formatted for HFS+, then they cannot be read by any OS that is older than MacOS 8.1.

I format them as DOS 1.44 MB on my System 7.5 Mac. I cannot format them in Mac OS X. This way makes the disk writable. But once I write to the disk, it just stalls and keeps spinning. If you load another operation from the disk, (ie: opening it in Disk Utility) all apps (including Finder) using the disk will stall. I then force quit them, but then the Finder can't reopen. It gives me the -10810 error. So then I can't log out. I even try force logouts by killing the loginwindow process, but then I can't log back in without doing a restart.

 

[MisterMe]

I format them as DOS 1.44 MB on my System 7.5 Mac. I cannot format them in Mac OS X. This way makes the disk writable. But once I write to the disk, it just stalls ....

DOS-formatted floppies are FAT12 giving 224 root directory entries. This puts severe limits on the number and size of files that can be written to the diskette. We can forget about the "8.3" naming limitation. I haven't used floppies for any significant work on my Mac for more than a decade. I was forced to abandon them when I found myself having to use file compression to archive a single file on floppy. Without a lot more knowledge about your situation, I have to assume that your files exceed the limits of DOS-formatted floppies.