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Eternal Floppy
- Thread starter jgp
- Start date
Depends on quite some factors.
If i remember correctly, Mojave was the very last MacOS which could mount HFS floppies (what your SE would generate).
Which meant you could read them on Mojave, but you could not write to them!
The last MacOS which could write to HFS floppies was Leopard (10.5.x), starting from Snow Leopord you could not write to HFS floppies anymore.
So with your newer macs you are out of luck.
There are however loads of software solutions, both on the side of newer computers, as on the side from the classic Macs.
They will however require a bit of research.
But very fulfilling once you start to get the hang of it!
Just be lucky you have a 1.44MB drive in your classic Mac, with the 400k/800k drives you are straight out of luck unless you have an extra gateway machine (like your SE/30) which you can use to create 400 or 800K floppies, after you moved data onto the SE/30 using 1.44 MB floppies.
If i remember correctly, Mojave was the very last MacOS which could mount HFS floppies (what your SE would generate).
Which meant you could read them on Mojave, but you could not write to them!
The last MacOS which could write to HFS floppies was Leopard (10.5.x), starting from Snow Leopord you could not write to HFS floppies anymore.
So with your newer macs you are out of luck.
There are however loads of software solutions, both on the side of newer computers, as on the side from the classic Macs.
They will however require a bit of research.
- Install virtualbox on your 2019 Mac (assuming it's an Intel mac and not Apple Silicon). Then create a Leopard virtualmachine.
If all is done right you should be able to boot the Leopard VM, and if a USB floppy drive is hooked up, you should be able to see it in Leopard and read/write to it. (Not yet used this method myself). - Find yourself an older windows (98/Me/XP) laptop (like early pentium or something, as long as it has a USB port and a floppy), they are cheap to find, just make sure the floppydrive works!
A lot of the software for the old classic macs you can find is the form of disk image files. Using Winimage you can copy them straight onto floppies using the old laptop, works a charm.
There is also software (HFVE explorer if I remember correctly) you can load onto the old laptop, and with that one you can create img files yourself (so load files into it, create .img file and the winimage over to floppy). - Get yourself a DB25 Bluescsi. And learn to work with BAsiliskII (google). You can mount entire harddrives onto a microSD card, using basilisk (an emulator for classic MAC OS's') and start moving data over onto the flashcard.
Once you get the hang of it, it's almost as handy as a USB thumbrive to move data back and forth between the old world and new world computers. - Once you have a way of getting new software on your SE/30, you could install for example PC Exchange, then you can create DOS formatted floppies which are much easier for new world computers to read/write from/onto.
But very fulfilling once you start to get the hang of it!
Just be lucky you have a 1.44MB drive in your classic Mac, with the 400k/800k drives you are straight out of luck unless you have an extra gateway machine (like your SE/30) which you can use to create 400 or 800K floppies, after you moved data onto the SE/30 using 1.44 MB floppies.
Thanks @Berenod. This is super helpful info. I have an older MacBook Pro that I can install Leopard on. Any recommendation on the USB Floppy or any $20 thing from Amazon will do?
Why do you mention an old Windows laptop? I have a recent Windows PC (ok, not bragging about it), could it use Winimage/HFVExplorer? (you had the name almost right).,
(I do feel lucky to have a working 1.44 drive for the Mac, I went through 4 Macs to get one...).
Why do you mention an old Windows laptop? I have a recent Windows PC (ok, not bragging about it), could it use Winimage/HFVExplorer? (you had the name almost right).,
(I do feel lucky to have a working 1.44 drive for the Mac, I went through 4 Macs to get one...).
Using PC Exchange on a variety of old Macs (mostly 100-series PowerBooks), I can move data easily between floppy-equipped Macs, and a USB floppy drive when connected to anything from a Windows 10 system, 10.4.11 PowerBook 17-inch, to M1 iMac and MBA. This only works for PC-formatted floppies, since the USB drive can't read Mac formatted disks.
I typically do the formatting on the System 7/MacOS 8/MacOS 9 Macs, but this is how I move most of my data around between old and new systems and back again.
I typically do the formatting on the System 7/MacOS 8/MacOS 9 Macs, but this is how I move most of my data around between old and new systems and back again.
Far as I know you can indeed run those programs (winimage, ...) on a recent Windows PC.
I went the "old laptop" way, as I love tinkering with older machines, and I had several lying around, so for me that is the "known working solution" with hardware already lying around
Don't have an external USB floppy, so never used the modern PC way.
I guess any brand (or no brand) external floppy drive should work, they all use the same technology.
Nowadays not using this route so much, now I just mount a "classic" harddrive image, which sits on a microSD card, in Basilisk, together with system 7.5 (works virtually instant on a modern PC/Mac).
Then simply move files between my PC's harddrive and the image like you do on a modern computer (copy/paste), unmount, stick the SD card in the BlueSCSI, stick that one in the DB25 SCSI connector of any of my old Macs, and the harddrive just appears, with all files on it!
Tens of Megabytes worth of data/programs transferred over in less then a minute, beats using 10's of floppies
Added advantage, you can unpack the .SIT files while in Basilisk, works likes a hundred times faster then doing all the unpacking on the classic Mac!
Not entitely correct.
Mac formatted 1.44MB floppies can perfectly be read using any USB floppy drive.
Mechanically/magnetically they work on the exact same principle as DOS floppies.
It's on a software level that there are differences, namely the file management system, and modern Mac OS's can only use HFS+ (also called HFS extendend) whereas our Classic Macs use HFS as file management system.
There are programs freely available (for example HFS explorer from Catacombae) which allows you to read/write Mac formatted disks on pretty much any other OS ( Windows, Linux and modern MacOS) using a bog standard floppy drive.
When you are talking about 400K/800K floppies, you are entirely correct, those can absolutely not be read a regular 1.44MD floppy drive.
They write and read mechanically different (for example variable disk speed while reading/writing), and that mechanism is simply not built into non-mac floppy drives.
Do note that the 1.44MB Mac floppy drives built into the later generations of the classic Macs can read/write all the Mac floppy formats, in a way they are "dual system". Which is why good working ones are getting harder to find, as they were only ever manufactured for those classic Macs.
So using one of those machines (a later SE or SE/30, even my Mac Portable has one) you can read 1.44MB floppies and then create sets of 400K or 800K floppies.
That's very helpful, thanks!
I have never tried the software you've suggested, so this is great information!
I tried HFSExplorer on my M1 iMac, but it doesn't appear to be functional. The software runs, but when I put a Mac formatted disk (from my PB 190 running System 7.5.5) into my Sony USB drive, the iMac can't read it, offers the usual initialize/eject/ignore dialog, and HFSExplorer can't find the disk or any content from it either. It really does behave as if the drive can't read Mac formatted floppies.
No matter - PC formatted floppies work perfectly well, and pretty much seamlessly for me across all my systems, even if there's a better way I could do it.
Actually, as an alternative, I'd probably use a PDQ to host my floppies and then FTP the files over to the iMac - that works perfectly too, but not quite so simple!
No matter - PC formatted floppies work perfectly well, and pretty much seamlessly for me across all my systems, even if there's a better way I could do it.
Actually, as an alternative, I'd probably use a PDQ to host my floppies and then FTP the files over to the iMac - that works perfectly too, but not quite so simple!
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