Recovering data from single density floppy desks?

On 24-Jul-2007, at 09:21, Harro de Jong wrote:
> The only drives that can read 400K disks are found in early Macs. How
> early, that's the question.

Well, I'm pretty sure any machine up to the early Performas could
read 400K, 800K, and 1.4 diskettes. If it could read 800K floppies,
it could read 400K (400K was simply a single density 800K, while the
800K where double density. The 1.4's where "high density" but used
constant sped motors, so they only held 1.44MB (twice the PC-standard
720K floppies) instead of 1.6MB.

I'm pretty sure my performa 6400 read 800K floppies, but I can't
swear to it as I was pretty much done with floppies by then.

On 25/07/2007 3:21 AM, "Harro de Jong" <hdjongtriview.nl> spake thus:

> But another article suggests "No Mac that does have a disk drive that
> can write 400K disks also has ethernet" which would suggest the cutoff
> is much earlier.

I'm guessing Mac Plus or maybe SE, running either System 6 or 7 (the latter
if all you want to do is read them). A Mac Plus should definitely do it, and
if you can dig up one of those SCSI-based Ethernet boxes then you could be
in business. Although getting TCP working on those old systems could be a
bit of a nightmare.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

On 24/07/2007 8:05 PM, "David Weintraub" <davidweintraub.name> spake thus:

> Floppy disks usually lost their contents after a few months of storage.

I have at least a couple of 8" floppies for an NEC APC that are still
bootable (plus a bunch that aren't). Or at least, they were a couple of
years ago --- that may no longer be true. No special precautions taken in
storing them. It really comes down to the quality of the media more than
anything else. You get the same effect these days with CDRs --- cheap = dies
quickly (or in the worst cases, doesn't even burn).

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

am 24.07.2007 11:03 Uhr schrieb tidbits-talktidbits.com unter tidbits-talktidbits.com:

> Does anyone know of an available external drive that would allow me > to recover data from early single density floppy discs.

My guess is that these disks are probably unreadable anyway. After all, when was the last time they were actually used. Floppy disks usually lost their contents after a few months of storage.

Quite not so... I recently happened to find some old floppy disks (3.5") in storage. They were on average about 15 years old. Most were disks with IIGS programs on them. All original media sold at that time.

I gave them a try and lo and behold every single disk could be read in the disk drive of my PowerBook G3 wallstreet. I even could copy the contents off them without any read errors or the like.

So the qualitiy of those 3.5" disks was much better than one expected...

Udo

Aanhalen Nik Friedman TeBockhorst <nikinik.net>:

> On 7/24/07, Harro de Jong <hdjongtriview.nl <mailto:hdjongtriview.nl>>
> wrote:
>
> But another article suggests "No Mac that does have a disk drive that
> can write 400K disks also has ethernet" which would suggest thecutoff
> is much earlier.
>
> There are plenty of ways to transfer data other than ethernet. You could
> do the old null-modem-cable hookup between two computers and send the
> files with ZTerm, or get an AppleTalk/Ethernet bridge and hook them onto
> a network, or (easier still) send your necessary files to an FTP server
> online and then download them from the same.

Perhaps the easiest way is this:
take one of the earlier Macs with a SuperDrive (400/800/1.4), something like a
MacLC, Performa 475, or Centris. Copy the files from the 400K floppy to the HDD,
and then back to a 1.44 MB floppy, DOS-formatted. You can read this floppy in
ANY PC or you can read it using a USB-floppy drive.

One more thing: System 5.x and earlier (yeahh..) used MFS (Macintosh File System
as opposed to Hierarchical File System), with no support for Folders. I think
all 400K floppies are MFS formatted. this shouldn't be a big deal, as you will
probably be able to read them anyway.

Hans Erik Hazelhorst

On 7/25/07 2:30 AM, "Nik Friedman TeBockhorst" <nikinik.net> wrote:

> Although the easiest thing to do (albeit potentially the most expensive) is to
> get an older Mac and hook up a SCSI CD-R drive and burn a CD of your old
> disks.

If the data is small enough to fit on a floppy, then it's probably something
you could just email to yourself. No cost involved.

--
Diane Ross, Microsoft Mac MVP
Entourage Help Page <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>

am 26.07.2007 11:03 Uhr schrieb tidbits-talktidbits.com unter
tidbits-talktidbits.com:

> Well, I'm pretty sure any machine up to the early Performas could
> read 400K, 800K, and 1.4 diskettes. I

Well, I'm pretty sure any Mac with a disk drive can read 800 k diskettes.
(400 k disks i didn't own and couldn't try...)

I fed my beige G3 MT a few apple IIgs 800 k disks and they were read just
fine (using Mac OS 8.6). I fed my PowerBook G3 Wallstreet those same disks
and they were read just fine, too.

Udo

On 28/07/2007 3:35 AM, "hazelhorision.nl" <hazelhorision.nl> spake thus:

> One more thing: System 5.x and earlier (yeahh..) used MFS (Macintosh File
> System as opposed to Hierarchical File System), with no support for Folders.

Although it did fake the appearance of folders at the UI level, i.e., you
had things that looked and behaved like folders in the Finder, but
underneath it was really just one directory.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

hazelhorision.nl wrote:
> Aanhalen Nik Friedman TeBockhorst <nikinik.net>:
>
> Perhaps the easiest way is this:
> take one of the earlier Macs with a SuperDrive (400/800/1.4), something like a
> MacLC, Performa 475, or Centris. Copy the files from the 400K floppy to the HDD,
> and then back to a 1.44 MB floppy, DOS-formatted. You can read this floppy in
> ANY PC or you can read it using a USB-floppy drive.
>
> One more thing: System 5.x and earlier (yeahh..) used MFS (Macintosh File System
> as opposed to Hierarchical File System), with no support for Folders. I think
> all 400K floppies are MFS formatted. this shouldn't be a big deal, as you will
> probably be able to read them anyway.

400K floppies files will very likely have resource forks. And copying them to a 1.44 DOS floppy on a system that old will likely loose the resource forks. Depends on the version of the Mac OS he would use.

Now if I was doing it (and I will be at some point) I have three thoughts.

1. Copy from the floppies to an internal or external HFS+ drive and attach said hard drive to a newer system to extract the files. As this will involve SCSI hard drives and that is hard unless you have a lot of older parts and various boot system lying about. I do but it will still likely involve 3 systems to get from "here to there" given the lack of SCSI support in Tiger.

2. Boot up an old system with a network card and use Timbuktu to transfer from the old floppies to something newer. I have an SE/30 with an Ethernet card but a blown display that I got for free that plan to do this with. But most folks don't likely have various older system setups on external hard drives with Timbuktu installed on them.

3. Find an Ethernet card to put into one of these older setups and boot it up. Share a folder from an OS X system. Mount the share on the older system and do finder copies. I did this recently with someone who had just bought a 20" Intel iMac and had a hard drive full of older files on a Performa running system 6.

David

Diane Ross wrote:


> If the data is small enough to fit on a floppy, then it's
> probably something
> you could just email to yourself. No cost involved.

The problem is connecting that old Mac to the internet. Most don't have
Ethernet built in, so you'd have to find one with an adapter. Or use a
modem. Then find a mail client that will run on the old machine, etc.

Harro de Jong

I realize I'm not the 1st to respond, but I have never experienced what you say in regards to floppy disks. I just thru a 3.5" 800k floppy, last used in 1994, into my backup server (a Performa 6400/200) and it reads and copies with no errors.

One simple solution is to plug an external floppy disk drive unit into a USB port. I use a drive made by Teac (model FD-05PUB).

> I realize I'm not the 1st to respond, but I have never experienced what you
> say in regards to floppy disks. I just thru a 3.5" 800k floppy, last used in
> 1994, into my backup server (a Performa 6400/200) and it reads and copies with
> no errors.

Just tried this with a 1994 disk... LC 575. No luck. Unreadable.

Tried my 1987 Masters thesis.... Mac SE. No show. File didn't even appear
on my iMac desktop.

Will try on my MacBook. Maybe it has the necessary software(?)

Paul,
W.Australia

On 31-Jul-2007, at 03:08, harold wrote:
> One simple solution is to plug an external floppy disk drive unit
> into a USB port. I use a drive made by Teac (model FD-05PUB).

I've never seen a USB floppy that supported 400K and 800K disks. All
the devices I've come across are for 1.4MB HD<1> disks only.

<1> High Density, not 'hard drive'

Paul Bradstreet wrote:
>> I realize I'm not the 1st to respond, but I have never experienced what you
>> say in regards to floppy disks. I just thru a 3.5" 800k floppy, last used in
>> 1994, into my backup server (a Performa 6400/200) and it reads and copies with
>> no errors.
>
> Just tried this with a 1994 disk... LC 575. No luck. Unreadable.
>
> Tried my 1987 Masters thesis.... Mac SE. No show. File didn't even appear
> on my iMac desktop.
>
> Will try on my MacBook. Maybe it has the necessary software(?)

One poster made a comment about data not lasting more than months on floppies. The thread is about reading older formatted Mac format floppies.

You could be running into either issue. But the data loss comment is very much misleading.

David

I can't fully remember the details, but didn't one version of Mac OS include a utility to read older disks? I'm thinking maybe System 5, 6, or 7. I think you could plug an external 400k/800k floppy drive into some of the Macs with newer drives and use that utility to access the disk in a read-only mode.

Sorry I can't be more specific. I have some of those drives, several old Macs, and even an Apple IIGS with ethernet. :-) But the systems aren't set up right now, and I'm sure I don't have any 400k disks to try it with.

I ran across this post not too long ago. Check out <http://
retrofloppy.com>. The service claims to be able to convert Apple's
400K single density floppy disks, and the price is about $3 per disk.
I don't know how many disks you have, but considering that you might
have to buy hardware, attempt to set everything up, etc., it might be
the most economical way to go.


=======================================
Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor,
and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it."
-- Elwood P. Dowd
=======================================

David Weintraub
davidweintraubworld.net
davidweintraub.name

Replying to "Copy from the floppies to an internal or external HFS+ drive"...

Easier said than done.

I ran into this last year. My Power Mac 8500 stopped booting up. I managed to fix it, but I realized that a) what good is a backup to a SCSI tape drive if you have no other equipment that can use it? and b) I'd better get the data off the floppy disks while I still had a floppy drive.

One of the disks was a 400K floppy from my original 128K Macintosh. I wanted to recover the files from it.

As others have posted, any Mac with a built-in floppy disk drive can read 400K floppies, including the PM8500. Hardware isn't the problem. The problem is that Apple removed support for the MFS file system starting with Mac OS 8.

I thought maybe I could load up an earlier OS with SheepShaver, but that didn't help, because any machine I had that could run SheepShaver didn't have a floppy drive.

Then I realized... I could boot up the PM8500 from the System 7.5 CD that came with the machine! While booted up from the CD it could read the files off of the 400K floppy.

But... When I upgraded the PM8500 to Mac OS 8.5, I converted the hard disk to HFS+. And here is the catch-22: Any Mac OS that can read a MFS formatted floppy CAN'T use a HFS+ disk drive!

Fortunately for me that wasn't an obstacle, because I have *two* hard drives in my PM8500, and years ago when I was playing with LinuxPPC I formatted the second drive with an ordinary HFS partition. So that drive was still accessible while booted in OS 7.5.

So I did manage to retrieve the files. Which largely were in formats that can't be understood anymore. Does anyone remember Microsoft File?

(That is a rhetorical question, with psychic foresight I had saved that database on the floppy in multiple formats, including comma delimited.)

On 8/6/07, mschmitt <mschmittmac.com> wrote:Nik

There are formats where even MacLinkPlus dare not venture. For example, I've got a spreadsheet created with Microsoft Multiplan.