External Floppy disk qurstion

[Johnnya101]

Hi all,

 

I'm getting a compact mac soon, an SE/30 (hope the deal goes through).

 

So I'm going to buy an scsi2sd in the future. But in the meantime I need a way of getting software on the thing.

 

I went on amazon and found a 10 pack of maxell disks, 1.44, and a USB drive. Someone even said they used the disks in the reviews for an SE! Anyways. My pc has an OS X virtual machine. I'll be creating floppies in that. Is it possible to do this with the newest OS X still? Will it work fine the the drive below?

 

Thanks!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00E9MD700/ref=ox_sc_act_image_2?smid=A29Y8OP2GPR7PE&psc=1

[Johnnya101]

Should say es, I know t says OS X compatable. But does anyone know if it's the best option?

[olePigeon]

I'm pretty certain current versions of OS X no longer have support for floppy drives, USB or otherwise.

[techfury90]

Even if they do, I would not use OS X with a USB floppy. Here's why: it never supported low level formatting disks. You may say "sure, I can erase a disk in Disk Utility!", but it just writes over the file system structures. It will not write new IDAMs, etc. like a full format operation does, which can cause reliability issues with old media.

[Johnnya101]

I ordered them. I'll try using windows then. Will windows mess up disk images when writing to the disk?

[techfury90]

The more important question is if your SE is a SuperDrive/FDHD model. If it's not, you will need an old Mac to make the disks. There is no getting around this, as 800k disks cannot be written on a PC in a format an 800k SE can read.

 

Edit: oh wait, saw it was an SE/30. Yes, you can make those disks on Windows with a USB FDD.

Edited January 10, 2017 by techfury90

[Johnnya101]

Yup. As you said, it's an SE/30, which I think ALL have a super drive?

[Anonymous Freak]

Two options:

1. Format the floppies as "Mac" on the SE/30, then use them in OS X via a USB floppy drive (yes, they will work - you can't format HFS/Mac format on OS X, but you can read/write just fine.)

 

2. If you have PC File Exchange installed on the SE/30, just use the disks in FAT/DOS/Windows format.

 

For writing disk *images*, you can use dd in the command line in OS X (or any UNIX/Linux) to write an .img file to the floppy drive, although it seems hit-or-miss for me.

[Cory5412]

Moved to compact mac subforum.

 

I believe USB diskette drives should still work in Sierra. A webcomic artist recently connected one to a Mac with Type C ports and was able to fit a bunch in.

 

The real challenge might be getting software that fits on a single floppy, or using an archival format that the Mac can understand and join multiple segments. (Stuffit Deluxe can do the thing, but you need a source of split archive files.)

[Mac128]

Hi all,

 

I'm getting a compact mac soon, an SE/30 (hope the deal goes through).

 

So I'm going to buy an scsi2sd in the future. But in the meantime I need a way of getting software on the thing.

 

I went on amazon and found a 10 pack of maxell disks, 1.44, and a USB drive. Someone even said they used the disks in the reviews for an SE! Anyways. My pc has an OS X virtual machine. I'll be creating floppies in that. Is it possible to do this with the newest OS X still? Will it work fine the the drive below?

 

Thanks!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00E9MD700/ref=ox_sc_act_image_2?smid=A29Y8OP2GPR7PE&psc=1

 

You don't need an OS X virtual machine, what works better is something like a Mac OS emulator like Basilisk II, or SheepShaver for Windows. 

 

There's a few tutorials here, geared toward a Mac, but they will give you the idea:

 

http://www.mac128.com