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Classic II and external 5.25 floppy drive.

30pin

Well-known member
I wanted to check some 5.25" floppies. I found a 5.25"Apple drive model #A9M0107. I plugged it into the back of my Classic II running O.S. 7.0. The floppy drive kept cycling and I kept getting a small screen with this" floppy is unreadable". The drive is open with no floppy in it. I tried a few times but no difference. I am thinking the floppy drive is faulty. I have never used an external 5.25 drive before. Are there any tips for checking or setting the drive? It seems to think it always has an unreadable disk in it, opened or closed. The open and close lever works fine. Anyone familiar with this type of drive?

 

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
Oh no....

I'm sorry to say this, but I think you may have just fried your Classic II's SWIM chip. :( The Apple 5.25" Drive should NEVER be connected to any Macintosh for this reason, save an LC with an Apple IIe card.

Have you tried using a floppy in your Mac's internal drive since? Its an easy enough mistake to make, especially with the same connector and all, but as I said, I think your Mac's floppy controller is gone. :(

 

30pin

Well-known member
I just checked my Classic II, the floppy still works! But I won't do that again. I have a LCII that may be safer to set up!!! Thanks for the warning.

 

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
Thank heavens for that! :)

You'll need an Apple IIe card to use the drive with an LC II, and IIRC, it'll only be accessible from within the Apple IIe environment. I don't think it will allow you to access 5.25" disks in the Finder.

 

Dog Cow

Well-known member
You could get 5.25" drives intended for Mac from 3rd party companies (not Apple). You'll have to search the used-market for these, I think.

But as stated earlier, connecting anything other than a 3.25" drive to your Mac is LETHAL!

800k Apple 3.25" drives from the GS work just fine, but not 5.25"!

 

Anonymous Freak

Well-known member
There are two different types of 5.25" drive that Apple made for use with the Mac:

1. If you have an Apple ][e card in an LC, you can use any standard Apple II floppy drive. It is accessible ONLY to the ][e environment.

2. Apple made a "PC Compatibility" 5.25" drive, that required a special card. The card was available in NuBus or SE PDS. And *ONLY* works on a Macintosh II (not any other model,) or a non-SuperDrive SE. This drive reads MS-DOS formatted 360 KB 5.25" disks. (And came with the needed software.) It does not read Apple II disks.

 
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