[X4U] OT: accessing old floppy disks

[Jim Freeman]

Thanks for all the helpfull answers. Apparently he has tried an 
external floppy drive, which will take a 1.4 meg floppy, but not an 
800k floppy. His currenlty computer is apparently a modern Mac running 
some version of OS X. I also own a VST external floppy drive, which I 
never use. I just checked it and it works with the 1.4 meg floppies I 
found in the bottom of a box somewhere. I don't have any 800k floppies 
to test, but from what I'm hearing it sounds like it won't work. Should 
I even bother sending my floppy drive to work with my wife tomorow?

As you can see this is a bit third hand, so I don't have all the 
information. It's the guy's PhD dissertation, presumably in some 
ancient word processing format. If he's like most people it will be an 
older version of Word.

I will pass on the info that any Mac with a built in floppy drive will 
read it. Maybe he can find someone with one. I'm also inquiring if 
anyone at my work has one. They put an old beige G3 in my office for a 
while. It had both a floppy and a zip drive. If that thing is still 
around I can copy the data to a 1.4 meg floppy or a zip disk, and get 
it onto a modern Mac that way. Or maybe make a network connection 
somehow.

Jim

On 23-Mar-05, at 4:07 PM, James S Jones wrote:

> Any Mac with a floppy drive should be able to read 800 K diskettes. 
> What it the destination of the documents?
>
> 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.