Way to copy to old macs?

[Zellio]

So I don't know where to put this, but this seems appropriate. How do I copy to an old Mac/Powerbook using system 7/9? I have some mac formatted floppies but not much else to work with

 

[MikeatOSX]

You should tell us first WHICH PowerBook you own.

 

[Zellio]

You should tell us first WHICH PowerBook you own.

The one in question is a 1400c with floppy drive instead of disk drive. And I have two apple desktops from that time period and a 190cs as well, so the question could be used for many other devices, but does it matter too much? Surely there's a way to get files onto the 2mb mac formatted floppies? I have tried and they do work on all (mac related products I mentioned above) with 3 1/2" floppy drive bays

The problem here is that the next step up, my g3, uses system 9 but has no floppy bays. Nothing below has a cd drive. I'm not sure how to proceed

 

[David Schmidt]

You might get away with a USB-attached floppy drive on the G3 with HD disks. I've not had tons of luck with really-new USB drives and disks (even HD disks) formatted long, long ago, but you might be able to get an interoperable disk if you format it using the G3.

 

[Zellio]

I have a usb floppy drive, I'll try this later. If anyone has any other ideas, let me know

 

[Anonymous Freak]

A USB floppy drive should work - it works on my Retina MacBook Pro running macOS High Sierra just fine!

A USB floppy drive should be able to read HD (1.4M / 2.0M) floppy disks just fine, but will not be able to read older DD (800k / 720k / 1.0M) floppy disks.

Note that you will have best results using an MS-DOS formatted (FAT) floppy disk, rather than a Macintosh formatted (HFS) disk, but that would require your older Macs having PC Exchange or similar Extension active.