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Sep 27, 2018 The final official version of macOS 10.14 Mojave, the latest operating system for Macs and MacBooks, has been released, and it in this guide we'll show you how to download. Jun 04, 2018 Once you are done, you can just launch the Mac App Store, go to the Updates section and you'll see macOS 10.14 Beta over there for download. Click on the Update button next to it and the download. See more I purchased my Tendak USB Floppy Disk Drive February 2018. I can't Write to new Disk, I can only Read Disk that I Recorded on from older Computers I have used. I now have to use the Tendak Floppy Disk Drive to Read those old disk. It have worked well for me as the newer computer does not have a Floppy Disk Drive installed. Jan 02, 2020 Windows BIOS/UEFI Post Installation Audio HDMI Audio General Help Graphics Network Hardware Troubleshooting OS X Updates The Workshop Bootloaders Customization Overclocking Case Mods Completed Mods iMac Mods Mac Pro Mods PowerMac G3 B&W PowerMac G4 PowerMac G4 Cube PowerMac G5 Others Retail Cases.

Originally Web posted Tuesday, 13 May 2008.
Content last modified Tuesday, 22 January 2019 .
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As time passes and floppy disks become relics of computing’s past (especially in the Macintosh world), folks seem to be confronting more problems accessing information stored on this older format. This page attempts to address methods and workarounds for accessing data on Macintosh floppy disks (using Apple Macintosh and clone hardware) and moving the desired data to newer Mac systems.

Floppy Can’t Be Read

“Hey! I’ve got a floppy drive on my Mac, and it reads some floppies just fine, yet not others. What’s the deal?”

Depends. Below are the most common scenarios:

400k and/or 800k Floppies with an External USB Floppy Drive

As is well documented, modern Macs from this millennium (and some before) no longer come with built-in floppy drives. The available option is a 3rd. party external floppy drive. All the ones i have seen connect via USB.

What is Not well-known is that these drives, being more generic, lack a crucial feature of Apple-specific floppy drives: Variable Speed. You may have noticed (or not) that long ago, when floppies were common, the original 3.5' single-side double-density (SSDD or for our purposes SS) hard-case floppies held something like 270k or 360k on PC-compatible computers (if they even used those… i didn’t and don’t know) while the same floppy formatted and used on a Mac held 400k. Similarly, double-side double-density (DSDD or for our purposes DS) 3.5' floppies hold 720k on a Wintel, and 800k on a Mac.

Mac 10.14.2 Windows Floppy Drive Reader Software Downloads

How did Apple do this? By using a variable-speed spindle drive system instead of fixed-speed, to cram more data on the same magnetic material space. That is why Mac floppy drives make sounds of different audible pitches as they move around the disk surface: the motor speed is changing!^[1]

As of the emergence of high-density (HD) floppies in the early 1990s, Apple was growing weary of being slammed around in the marketplace. One of many, many causes was the higher price of Macintosh computers. While there were many reasons for this, one was Apple’s penchant to innovate and improve upon the standards. As the Wintel juggernaut began to steamroll them, Apple sought ways to cut costs. It was a whole lot easier and more financially sane for Apple to go with the flow and use the same standards for 1.4 MB floppies as the Wintel world… economies of scale, dontcha know! This is all my conjecture, anyway^[2]. This is fact: With 1.4 MB HD floppies, Apple agreed that fixed-speed drive was what they would use.

Bottom line: a generic fixed-speed external USB floppy drive will work with 1.4 MB HD floppies, yet (to the best of my knowledge, and i may be wrong) not Mac 800k or 400k floppies. They’ll likely also read 720k DS floppies^[3]. My guess would be that they could read 360k SS floppies from other systems. (I don’t have/could not easily make a 360k floppy to test this theory.)

Unless you can find an external USB drive that specifically claims to support Mac 800k disks (i really doubt you will find one that supports 400k), you will almost certainly need to find an older Mac with a built-in floppy drive to access your data on DS and SS disks.

400k Floppies and Mac OS 8.0 or Later

So ya say ya gotta Mac with a built-in SuperDrive that is allegedly able to handle 400k, 800k, and 1.4 MB disks, and it does work with 800k DS and 1.4 MB HD disks, yet not with 400k SS disks? Well, you need more than the drive… you need the correct Mac software.

“Huh? Whut?”

Please look carefully at the two images just above this paragraph. They are two screenshots of the same floppy disk in the same drive of the same Mac, taken minutes apart. The difference? The Mac OS version running the machine. The “unreadable” picture was when OS 9.1 was in charge. The working, mounted disk Finder window—same disk, same conditions—was when the very same Mac was running OS 7.6.1.

MFS — Macintosh File System

You’re suffering from the MFS Blues! MFS, the original Macintosh File System, was a flat-file structure used on Macintosh computers from Day 1 until the era of the 128k ROMs and the Mac Plus, which is to say circa 1986. It had the illusion of folders, yet no actual directories. With the 128k ROMs, System 3^[4], and all that came HFS: Hierarchical File System: folders that were actual directories and subdirectories.

Gone audiobook michael grant download torrent. For backwards compatibility yet moving the world forward, Apple decided that the Normal Order of Things would be that 400k floppies would be formatted as MFS when erased, and 800k and larger floppies as HFS. (There are tricks to circumvent these defaults… tricks i have not used and therefore not memorized. Folks who used these tricks could create 400k HFS floppies for sure, and maybe 800k MFS floppies.)

Thing is, on these early Mac OS versions which supported both MFS and HFS, there was no electro/mechanical way to detect DS from SS diskettes. Apple needed to count on the user to make the correct choice (screenshot is from System 3 running on a Mac Plus):

Clicking the One-Sided button formatted the disk as 400k MFS. Clicking the Two-Sided button formatted the disk as 800k HFS.

800k DS disks formatted 400k MFS?

Many Mac users have found it tough to let go of their older Macs, especially early on when they were (relatively) very expensive pieces of equipment. A person might have several Macs, one or more of them original 128k or 512k non-Enhanced “Fat Macs” (Fat=more RAM in this case) with the original 64k ROMs which only understood MFS format. Sitting in front of their 512KE or newer Mac (with 128k or larger ROMs), they might very well want to format a double-sided diskette as single-sided, for use in their older Mac(s)—especially in the latter years of the 1980s and thereafter when SS/DD 3.5' floppies first became scarce then disappeared from the market. Thus, while rare, it may not be terribly unusual within a specific floppy disk collection to find disks marked DS/DD with 400k capacity and MFS formatting.

400k SS disks formatted 800k HFS?!

As well, floppy disks were expensive in the mid-late 1980s. Rumors circulated circa 1987 that due to lower demand for single-sided 400k diskettes, Sony merely ran the same production line for double-sided 800k and single-sided 400k, marking them differently and probably not QAing the second side for the ones being sold as single-sided. Someone found out that the less expensive Sony single-sided 3.5' diskettes sold new during this period more often than not formatted successfully as 800k double-sided. Older Sony single-sided disks and most single-sided disks from other manufacture