Reading an old Mac floppy?
 

I found a 3.5" floppy in the lock box I had when I was a kid and I'm dying to know what 12 year old me thought important enough to put on a floppy and lock it away. I have a USB floppy drive.

I've tried running MacDisk and it says it can't find the Macintosh volume header. Windows 10 says it's not a valid disk. I am 100% sure that I would have used a Mac to create the disk...my trusty old Mac IIsi running System 7 or System 8.

Are there any other things I could try or is the disk just hopelessly degraded at this point? Perhaps there's a way to pull the data off the disk bit by bit and analyze it?

I wonder what would a 12 years old boy put on a floppy dsk locking it away to hide it from his parents.... hmmm ;)

Oh, no, I had Zip drives for that... :)

Actually, this predated the Zip drives. I had their predecessor...they were made by Iomega I think and the drive cartridges were more like 5.5" cartridges. Each held 80 MB. I forget what they were called...

I'm sure it was a diary or something like that.

edit: it was the SyQuest drive! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology

Not Bernoulli Box?

As I recall they were stupidly expensive. Of course, so was the 800 MB external hard drive I got around that time...I think it was $800. People's reaction was, "800 MB?! Are you going to start a BBS or something?"

I think you need a Mac of that era. IIRC, Macs wrote data on FD differently than MS-DOS machines of that day (when Windows ran over MS-DOS). Macs could read and write MS-DOS format FDs but not the other way around.

https://fletcherpenney.net/2018/02/r...c_floppy_disks
https://lowendmac.com/2016/floppy-di...the-mac-world/

Find an old school MUG perhaps?

what about the old SCSI drive in an old Mac , is there anyway to read them ?

ASCII porn? :)

No , I was on the LA Freenet back in the la te 80s , and probably on a Mac Plus !

SCSI interface HD? Haven't seen a controller card for such in decades. Not sure if my sister still has my old desktop (in Kensington) but it has a SCSI controller. 2GB was a huge amount of space in the mid '90s.

My Google search found a blog post, that seems to describe the problems in reading old Mac floppies in detail and offers hints on affordable solution.

I have some old functioning Apples and Macs still around from the late 1980s and early 1990s. I haven't turned them on in ages. At some point I will probably have to toss them. I also have some ancient Apple ][ computer with something like 8kb of memory, and the last time I started it up was about a decade ago. I had forgotten that there were computers with such little memory, but maybe that was because the TRS-80 had more. :D

My excuse for keeping these around was that I still had files from using them. Not sure the soft or hard floppies still all work. The TRS-80 used to have me running things from a tape recorder IIRC.

Ah, used to have Mod I computers in high school. Nothing like taking 10 minutes to load a small program on your 16k computer, and then it not loading correctly.

There are still programs for my Mod III that worked better than anything I have today.

They are probably worth a lot of money especially if the 8kb memory Apple computer is an Apple 1 :D

Hah, their solution is to buy an old Mac.

In any case, the disk I'm trying to read is a 1.44 MB HD floppy, which according to that article a USB floppy drive should be able to read.