[iBook] Need Floppy Drive For iBook G3 900

[Fred Stevens K2FRD]

Thanks, Bob! This is exactly the kind of information I was looking for. I thought about just buying an old laptop which has a floppy drive, but I didn't want to mention it in my inquiry so as not to lead the question. With your info, I will now start shopping on eBay for an old (antique) iBook or PowerBook rather than wasting money on a floppy which won't work.

Fred

At 8:50 -0700 13/10/2005, Robert Eye wrote:
>Fred,
>
>If some of these are on 800k disks, none of the USB
>floppy readers will touch them. I'd like to be proven
>wrong on this, but I don't think that going to happen.
>
>Your best bet would be to buy or borrow an older Mac
>that does read them and either ethernet connect your
>iBook to this machine to get them, or e-mail the files
>(I recommend that you stuff them into hqx files first
>just to be safe) from the old Mac to yourself and then
>read them onto the iBook. If the older Mac has CD-RW
>capability, so much the better - just burn a disk.
>
>Regards,
>
>Bob Eye
>Dallas, TX
>
>P.S. Macs only read/write 800k and 1.4MB floppy disks
>if they were Mac formatted - some other formats (Apple
>PRO-DOS?) might have had different capacities. There
>are basically only 2 kinds of 3.5" floppy disks - DSDD
>(double sided double density), which work as Mac
>formatted 800k disks, and HD which are 1.4MB. There
>were also SSDS at 400k which were the disks avaialble
>when the Mac was first released, but were quickly
>supplanted when the 800k's came out.
>
>Plus, Apple's floppy driver (in the IWM chip) was able
>to control the angular velocity of the drive, allowing
>Apple to get a little higher density on the DSDD
>floppies, 800k vs 720k on IBM-formatted floppies. It
>appears that either the USB floppy makers didn't want
>to or couldn't use Apple's driver, or Apple wasn't
>willing to license it.
>
>--- Fred Stevens K2FRD <k2frd at mac.com> wrote: