[X4U] OT: accessing old floppy disks

[Fabian Fang]

On Mar 23, 2005, at 7:21 AM, Jim Freeman wrote:

> A collegue of my wife needs to get at some important documents that 
> are on Macintosh formatted double density floppy disks. He says all 
> the disk drives he has tried only support high density disks.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> How far back do you have to go to find a Mac that can read a DD disk? 
> I have an old 180c powerbook at my parents' house somewhere.

 From the latest Macworld Weekly Newsletter:

MAC 911 WEBLOG

By Christopher Breen, Contributing Editor, Macworld 
(mac911 at macworld.com)

Flipping over Floppies

Reader ....  has a stash of old floppies that contain fonts from Adobe, 
Agfa, and other companies. It's bad enough that the fonts are stored on 
this prehistoric media, but said media is of the 800KB variety. He 
wonders what course to take.

I'm afraid that the answer is to find an old Mac (an SE on up to a 
beige Power Mac G3 will do the trick), insert the floppies into that 
Mac's drive, create disk images of the floppies, and then copy the 
images to the current Mac. Third-party USB floppy drives support 1.4MB 
HD floppies but not double-density 800KB disks.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 1528 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://listserver.themacintoshguy.com/pipermail/x4u/attachments/20050323/d00fdb1f/attachment.bin