imaging floppies under OS X

[ChristTrekker]

Having not worked with floppies under OS X ever, I hope this is not too stupid a question...

Is there an OS X tool to create disk images usable in, for example, System 7? I find myself wanting to archive my old floppies before they all completely fail.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Well, if you have a PPC running Tiger or older, there's always the option of running Disk Copy under Classic. (And if you are running 10.2 or older, you get an actual OS X-native version of Disk Copy.)

In OS X 10.3+ proper, there is Disk Utility. I don't know about cross-compatibility between Disk Utility and Disk Copy, though. (And Disk Utility imaging is the only way to "format" a floppy disk as HFS in later versions of OS X. You take a blank HFS disk, image it, then write the image out to another disk.)

I believe DMGConverter can convert between Disk Utility and Disk Copy formats, but I'm not positive.

 

[barana]

IMGconverter us useless to us to who would like to use it, it requires 10.4....

 

[slomacuser]

Just a tought ... is there anybody who could do a DB-19 converter to USB?

It would be nice to connect USB key to a DB-19 external floppy port and the USB key would act like a 20 HD. And when whould you connect to Mac OS X, you could manage files with Mini vMac?

 

[yuhong]

I don't know about cross-compatibility between Disk Utility and Disk Copy, though.

I think they use the same DMG/UDIF format in the OS X versions.

But version 6.x on Mac OS 9 used a different IMG/NDIF format.

 

[Mac128]

Just a tought ... is there anybody who could do a DB-19 converter to USB?

Yes and then you'd have to write an OSX driver for it. And Mini vMac would have to have the ability to access it, something Paul Pratt has not been interested in developing.

And don't forget Snow Leopard dropped support to write to HFS disks.

However, this topic has been discussed at length on this forum. There are ways to mount a USB floppy drive under SheepShaver and work within a native environment.

But the question I really have is why wouldn't you just copy your files on your old Mac? Make your disk images on the native Mac as well?

 

[ChristTrekker]

But the question I really have is why wouldn't you just copy your files on your old Mac? Make your disk images on the native Mac as well?

I don't have a Mac running Mac OS < 10 any more. I want to image my old floppies "just in case".

 

[CJ_Miller]

I believe OS X machines can only deal with standard 1.4MB floppies. Also for older floppies there are different kinds of formatting which require hardware and OS support. Here is the most concise data dump I have found on this:

http://www.siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.html

 

[CJ_Miller]

I don't have a Mac running Mac OS < 10 any more. I want to image my old floppies "just in case".

IMO there's no reason to bother with layers of clunky emulation and abstraction when the real thing is readily available. I recommend that you enlist the help of a friend who still has an old Mac.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

If you have a beige (or equivalent PowerBook) running 10.1 or earlier, you can load a(n old, out-of-date, no longer developed) floppy driver that is slow and buggy, but it does work. It happily reads 800K disks, too. (Driver is insanely buggy in 10.2, and won't work at all in 10.3+.)

Note, when I say "slow", I mean "ridiculously, agonizingly, painfully slow". I seem to recall it taking about four minutes to copy a single 100 KB file to a disk.

edit: Added no longer developed disclaimer.

 

[Mac128]

I don't have a Mac running Mac OS < 10 any more. I want to image my old floppies "just in case".

Then setup SheepShaver and get yourself a USB floppy drive and set it up as an external device. I believe SheepShaver will recognize it as a drive and will happily read a disk inserted into it. This works great for any HFS 1.44MB Disk. You're out of luck for 800K disks, however.