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| Thread ID: 145756 | 2018-01-22 20:34:00 | Reading old Mac 3.5" floppies on a Windows machine? | Tony (4941) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1445214 | 2018-01-22 20:34:00 | Is this even possible? I have a tech-challenged friend who has some old discs with card info on them that he wants to access. He thinks they are Mac discs. Has anyone any suggestions for ways to get at the data? I've told him he needs to find a Mac enthusiast but it would be nice to be able to help him if I can. |
Tony (4941) | ||
| 1445215 | 2018-01-22 22:04:00 | You can use Macdisk or Macdrive. But they're not free | Speedy Gonzales (78) | ||
| 1445216 | 2018-01-23 22:36:00 | PC can only read 1.44MB floppies, Mac sometimes used 800K and less. You maybe successful using Linux with hfsplus and hfsutils. | Kame (312) | ||
| 1445217 | 2018-01-23 23:05:00 | I've talked with the guy who asked me and it turns out he got the disks from someone else. I've told him his first step is to go back to the donor and see if he still has a machine that can read them, and if not then to find out what the machine was before it presumably got dumped. That might give us a clue as to what the format might be. According to my contact the disks have "DD/DS" on them, which makes me think they are possibly not 400/800K disks, but 720k/1.44mb in which case we might have a chance of reading them on a PC. I just notice a typo in my original post. It should say car info - he is trying to get data about an old MG he is restoring. |
Tony (4941) | ||
| 1445218 | 2018-01-24 00:15:00 | May no longer be readable anyway. Age, mold, general deterioration. Some brands & batches were quite unreliable , 1 quite famous Brand name had a run of really bad floppies with high fail rates . You may need to use something like the old Norton for Dos : Disk Revive (?) I forget what the revive program was called , but used to work wonders on partly unreadable floppies |
1101 (13337) | ||
| 1445219 | 2018-01-24 00:32:00 | May no longer be readable anyway. Age, mold, general deterioration. Some brands & batches were quite unreliable , 1 quite famous Brand name had a run of really bad floppies with high fail rates . You may need to use something like the old Norton for Dos : Disk Revive (?) I forget what the revive program was called , but used to work wonders on partly unreadable floppies I am totally not optimistic about getting any results. I'm also not going to over-exert myself - there is absolutely no evidence that there is anything of any use on these disks even if we can read them. |
Tony (4941) | ||
| 1445220 | 2018-01-24 01:23:00 | I went through a similar thing with my neighbour couple of years ago. He had 3.5 disks but the Mac itself had long been disposed of. I have a few old Macs, some of which still work. I wasn't able to retrieve the data though. My suggestion to him was to contact a vintage Mac users club (if there is one). | Tbird650 (6754) | ||
| 1445221 | 2018-01-24 01:28:00 | Maybe this club (www.classic-computers.org.nz) | Tbird650 (6754) | ||
| 1445222 | 2018-01-24 01:31:00 | Maybe this club (www.classic-computers.org.nz) That could be a definite maybe. I'll pas it on to my friend. Thanks. |
Tony (4941) | ||
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