Need floppy drive compatible with Leopard

[dotcomlarry]

I know, I know, what heathen am I to need a floppy drive for Leopard... However, I've been handed some old floppy disks at work that I need to recover files from to back up on CD/DVD. I've looked around a bit and haven't been too encouraged about finding a floppy drive that's compatible with Leopard. So I wanted to ask the MacRumors community...

Is there a floppy drive out there that's compatible with Leopard? They're all Mac formatted floppies, so I can't access them in Fusion.

 

[psingh01]

I know, I know, what heathen am I to need a floppy drive for Leopard... However, I've been handed some old floppy disks at work that I need to recover files from to back up on CD/DVD. I've looked around a bit and haven't been too encouraged about finding a floppy drive that's compatible with Leopard. So I wanted to ask the MacRumors community...

Is there a floppy drive out there that's compatible with Leopard? They're all Mac formatted floppies, so I can't access them in Fusion.

I think any USB Floppy Drive would work. You could also use MacDrive software http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/ to access mac formatted disks from a windows machine.

 

[Sky Blue]

I think any USB Floppy Drive would work.

Yeah, we have an old one that works with Leopard.

 

[dotcomlarry]

I tried using a TEAC FD-05PUB that my boss had lying around. It works for him on his Windows machine, but doesn't come up in Leopard even with a disk in.

 

[MisterMe]

... It works for him on his Windows machine, but doesn't come up in Leopard even with a disk in.

What kind of disk?

 

[dotcomlarry]

Um, a Mac-formatted 3.5" floppy disk.

 

[kopesetic]

FYI,

I have a similar problem. I have two different Macs running 10.4 that do not want to mount older floppies. I am using a USB TEAC FD-05PUB.

I can put in a new disk and format it and use the new floppy, but some old floppies are unreadable.

However, when I boot my machine into system 9.3 it will read the old floppies just fine.

Ideally I would like to get 10.4 to do the job, but system 9 is working for me now.

Kevin

 

[Guiyon]

It depends on the type of floppy. Most drives will have no problem reading the old 720KB/1.44MB double-sided ones but I have yet to find a drive that will read the older 800k floppies; even the 720/1.44 floppies have a tendency to be VERY touch under MacOS X though. I have my beige G3 floating around for just this reason as I am in the process of archiving a bunch of these old disks to a DVD. I've found the most reliable way to do everything is to image each disk MacOS 8/9 using Disk Copy, save it to an IDE drive, pop the drive into an external case (or, in the case of OS9, enable file sharing over TCP/IP), copy the images over, convert them to "dmg" using hdiutil and burn the batch to a CD or DVD.