Topic: Reading Mac formatted floppies under Windows 98?

[Death_Merchant]

Thursby DAVE has a demo also.
All you'd likely need is a crossover ethernet cable  

[Maxillius]

OS X reads and writes for windows, just depends on the application that's supposed to read them.  My PC-formatted zip disk works fine on the mac I'm on now

[Death_Merchant]

True enough,
I assumed the Mac in question was not running Mac OS X.

No stock Mac that had a floppy drive is capable of running Mac OS X.

LOL... OK.
I did manage to get Mac OS X running on an old PowerMac 8500 with a G4 accelerator card
However, the hacked unix driver for the floppy never did work quite right.....  

[Sethan]

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Holy cow,
Mac's haven't had floppies for what? 6 years now...

You say networking the Mac to PC (like using Thursby's DAVE) is not possible?

I'll dig through some old stuff in my office. I vaguely remember something called Mac-PC Link. Probably out of print....  

The (teenage) daughter of a friend needs to get some files she created on a Mac while out of town onto a PC.  It's basically a one time thing which is why I was hoping for some freeware that could do it.

TB613 I found what appears to be a demo of TransMac and I am downloading it.  Hopefully that will do the trick.

Thanks guys.  

If that doesn't work and you have access to another Mac, IIRC, you should be able to copy the files to the Mac, format a floppy on a PC, and copy the files down to the PC formatted disk.

[IKV Nemesis D7L]

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If that doesn't work and you have access to another Mac, IIRC, you should be able to copy the files to the Mac, format a floppy on a PC, and copy the files down to the PC formatted disk.  

That was the first solution that I found and relayed to them.  Unfortunately until she repeats the out of town trip none of us has access to a Mac.  When (or if) she will do that again I don't know.  

I will be giving them the TransMac on floppy Saturday or before.   Hopefully that will solve it.  If not I'll just have to see what else you guys come up with.

Thanks again to all.  Much appreciated.  

[Sethan]

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If that doesn't work and you have access to another Mac, IIRC, you should be able to copy the files to the Mac, format a floppy on a PC, and copy the files down to the PC formatted disk.  

That was the first solution that I found and relayed to them.  Unfortunately until she repeats the out of town trip none of us has access to a Mac.  When (or if) she will do that again I don't know.    

You don't have a print shop nearby?  I understand they mostly use macs - or used to before they saw the light.  

[Clark Kent]

I never thought I'd see soemthing like this in here.
Sadly, this shouldn't be as hard as it is.  Macs have been able to format and read floppy disks since system 7 (early to mid nineties).  Most mac programs like clarisworks (now appleworks) also have the option to save files in a PC format (including the mac version of MS office programs).  While Macs no longer come stadnard with floppies, even the most recent mac OS (OS X) still has the floppy dirvers built in, so you can still make floppy disks if you choose to have a drive (usually an external USB one).  
that should clear up the problem for future use.  There are mac emulation programs out there- I've seen them, I just can't remember where.  Windows tends to not bend over backwards to be compatible with media from other sources like most companies do.  Usually, when trying to go from one to the other, I try to make sure things are kosher from the Mac end.
CK

[IKV Nemesis D7L]

The TransMac demo worked.  Thanks a lot guys.    

[Sirgod]

That's Cool Nemesis, I'm glad you figured out how. I actually forgot all about Print shops, Like Kinkoes.

Stephen

[Bonk]

My experience with mac floppies is that the mac only recognises its own floppy filesystem about 30% of the time (and you can't eject the disk when it does not... get that paperclip out...) floppies are dreadfully unreliable, mac formatted floppies even worse... you are lucky to have recovered the data. (This may be my experience only due to the age of mac systems that use floppies...)  

[Clark Kent]

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My experience with mac floppies is that the mac only recognises its own floppy filesystem about 30% of the time (and you can't eject the disk when it does not... get that paperclip out...) floppies are dreadfully unreliable, mac formatted floppies even worse... you are lucky to have recovered the data. (This may be my experience only due to the age of mac systems that use floppies...)    

I haven't had that kind of experience.  Much to the contrary, when I have a disk that I can't retrieve data from, the best bet for me is one of my macs.  I have had my Compaq spit out diskettes formatted by the compaq itself,a nd then go to the mac, and do nothing with it but copy data from it and it never be able to work in my Compaq again, though.  Actually, that's happened quite a bit to me.  Usually, though, when I make a PC formatted floppy on a mac it works at least once in my Compaq.  This is part of my utter distaste of windows (may just be an ME thing).  I like so  much of the software and hardware I have for PC, but windows pisses me off.  Too bad really, alot of fine hardware and software out there run on a POS system.
CK