OT: Reading Mac Floppies

Fred Cisin cisin at xenosoft.com
Fri Jul 3 19:33:35 CDT 2015


On Fri, 3 Jul 2015, Joe Giliberti wrote:
> Greetings,
> I know this may be OT, but can someone tell me if a modern PC (with a USB
> floppy drive) could read 1.44MB floppies from a 68k Mac? I want to use a
> Powerbook 190 for some word processing and need a means of transferring
> data.

Hardware, yes.
Software, maybe.

The 1.4M (how many bytes are in a Megabyte?) Mac disks have 512 bytes per 
sector, etc. and do not require any different hardware.

If your USB drive permits accessing sectors, then appropriate software on 
the PC can read those disks.


NOTE: However, 400K and 800K Mac disks are GCR, instead of MFM, and 
require a different disk controller than the standard NEC FDC in PCs.


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