Under Mac OS 7.6 and 7.6.1, they can read 400K floppies but not write to them.

Macs with 800K double-sided drives and Mac-compatible 1.4MB High Density (HD) drives can read and write the MFS format used by 400K disks as long as they are running System 7.5.5 or earlier. (This is also the reason non-Mac computers can’t mount 400K and 800K Mac floppy disks.) These drives had a variable speed motor that allowed the Mac to pack 400K into a disk that would only hold 360 KB on a fixed-speed drive. The original Mac floppy disk format was MFS, for Macintosh File System, and it is only used for 400K single-sided floppies – the only kind of floppy drive supported by the original Macintosh, the Mac 512K Fat Mac, and the Lisa 2 (a.k.a. They just MIGHT be able to read it very cheaply.Earlier today in the Apple Macintosh Enthusiasts Facebook group, Charles Lott asked if an OS X Mac with a USB floppy drive could write disks that a Mac running System 7 could use. Secondly, though, you might get lucky with a data recovery company – It’s entirely possible that there’s nothing physically damaged with the floppy, and maybe not even much magnetization loss. My first point is to explain WHY some posters above suggesting trying an assortment of pcs, in the hopes that one may read it. That pretty much defeated the whole idea of using floppies to transfer from one pc to another, but it was still okay for backups. The result was a whole bunch of floppies which could be read easily by the pc which had written them, but not in any other pc. In the last few years of me using floppies, I increasingly found that the drive heads were slightly out of alignment. The above is certainly a possibility, but the reality might be a lot simpler and cheaper. A big scanner with document feed can make short work of OCR’ing a book however. OCR will have errors too, so there is no easy answer. So, it is worth pricing professional recovery against OCR.

However no matter what, the signal to noise will be much less than optimal, and you should expect errors in any recovered data. I would certainly try the recovery programs, but they may not get enough traction on an old floppy.Ī specialised recovery company will likely have gear that allows for greater signal gain, and can tweak things to get the bits off the floppy. This is a different problem to a floppy with data damage (ie bad individual sectors, corrupt blocks). So a normal drive won’t be seeing a strong enough signal to reliably get data. The media may well simply losing magnetisation.

Cant read 3.5 floppy disk formats