[vcf-midatlantic] Recovering Macintosh floppies

[David Ryskalczyk]

There is an Applesauce at the museum that may be usable for this. I can’t remember if it has a 3.5” drive that can be connected to it.

If these are 1.44 MB “HD” disks, they would be easier to read — those can typically be read with even a USB floppy drive and software such as ddrescue.

If not, and these are 400K/800K disks, the Applesauce with appropriate drive would be the best option. 3.5” drives compatible with the unit at the museum are the Apple 3.5” Drive (A9M0106) and the FDHD (G7287) — other drives are not compatible. An A9M0106 with an FDHD internal mechanism installed would also work.

Be sure to unplug the Applesauce from USB before changing drives, and only ever connect one drive at a time.

To tell the disks apart, the person can look for the HD hole as well as the HD markings on the disk itself. Considering these disks are from a Quadra, they could be either.

Once the disks are imaged, I have typically used emulators such as SheepShaver to extract the data. Additionally, LibreOffice can open many legacy formats directly.

David

> On May 10, 2024, at 8:02 AM, Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
> 
> OK. No one answered this. Does anyone have working Quadra and is local to
> InfoAge?
> 
> Someone is looking to recover files from a 3.5 floppy disk. It is unknown
> which software it was made with.
> 
> He needs to:
> 
> 
>  - Print out the files (each is a character study of no more than 10
>  print pages)
>  - Open the files and allow him to use his  cell phone to capture each
>  page to re-type on his PC
>  - Or provide some other way of capturing the file contents so he can
>  re-create these data on a modern computer.
> 
> 
> 
> Let me know if you are local and can help.
> 
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> Jeff
> 
>> On Thu, Apr 25, 2024 at 11:00 PM Jeffrey Brace <jeffrey at vcfed.org> wrote:
>> Is there someone coming to the repair workshop that can help someone
>> recover Macintosh files from 3.5" disks? Likely they are word processing
>> files from a Quadra.
>> Please let me know.
>> Thanks!
>> Jeff Brace