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My mother has those 3 Monotype floppy disks for Mac with fonts on them that she would like to recover. However, the only Mac we still have that has a floppy drive is a Macintosh SE, and while it works pretty well for a 22-years-old computer, there's no way for us to transfer anything from it to newer, shinier Intel Macs.
We could, however, verify that the 18-years-old floppies are still in working condition.
I have access to PCs with floppy drives. However, the floppies are in Mac format, so Windows won't read them.
What can I do? If I can get the files on them, that would be perfect. However, anything as low as a disk image of the floppies would be enough to get me going.
zneak
Posted 2011-08-27T17:20:48.070
Reputation: 989
Unfortunately if these are double density 800k disks (such as those used with the Mac SE) you can't read them with a regular PC floppy drive & controller -- they use higher angular densities on the outer tracks, and a standard PC floppy drive & controller just have no mode to support. It's only the Mac 1.44MB high density floppies (supported on the SE FDHD and later) that use the same physical format as PC ones so you can just take a raw image with WinImage or
ddon any PC floppy drive. – rakslice – 2018-04-19T07:20:08.6071
@rakslice That said, a KryoFlux or an x86 PC with a parallel port, registered copy of Disk2FDI, and a Disk2FDI cable can be used to dump 800k disks without an old Mac. (In the case of the KryoFlux, as I understand it, it just samples the flux transitions returned by the drive at a high enough resolution that it can derive GCR-encoded disk images from the raw stream in software without needing to alter the spindle speed.)
– ssokolow – 2018-06-19T06:52:43.100Yes, I know that it doesn't matter. Though, I've tried
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=~/disk.imgwith a 3-years-old Mandriva LiveCD and all I got was an I/O error. I'll try again with Windows and WinImage; I didn't know any software that made images out of floppies. Thank you. – zneak – 2011-08-27T18:10:53.840I have a couple CDs with images of every floppy I ever owned, or found useful. I wasnt that long ago that you still had to break out a DOS bootable floppy to work on an old machine. Now that I think about it, I wonder where those CDs are... – Keltari – 2011-08-27T19:23:50.757
A couple of CDs? You must not have had many floppies?
:-)Granted, floppies were small and CDs are large in comparison, but I definitely cannot copy every floppy I’ve got in that box under my bed to just a couple of CDs. – Synetech – 2011-08-27T19:35:44.407You can fit 450 floppies on one CD, not including compression. How many floppies do you have?! – Keltari – 2011-08-27T19:40:12.803