9 Jan
2023
9 Jan
'23
7:41 p.m.
On Jan 8, 2023, at 7:41 PM, Doc Shipley via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 1/8/23 19:29, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
For the CD’s and CD-R’s I’ve been doing, I started using Roxio Toast, but after a few the
DVD burner on my 2010 Mac Pro decided to stop reading disks. As a result I’ve been using
a vintage 2011 MacBook Pro, and unmounting the disk, then using dd.
What is the difference between a “Blue Pill” and a “Greaseweazle”?
I plugged in the USB Floppy to my modern Mac Laptop, and was pleasantly surprised to find
things working as well as they are. After a bit more fighting, I think those two floppies
are unreadable. The one I couldn’t even copy data out of. The other I was able to get
the data off of. These are floppies that haven’t been stored well, so I’m not surprised.
Looking into this, Greaseweazle looks interesting. I’d seen some of the posts about it,
but not really paid attention. I have to admit, in part, due to owning a Catweazle Zorro
board for my Amiga 3000, that I was never that happy with. It looks like everything is
there to then covert the Greaseweazle images to use on an emulator (I’d want to mostly use
on DOS Box).
As it happens, one of the CD-R’s that I imaged, contained basically all my Mac floppies, I
have found a couple that didn’t get imaged. I’d imaged them on my PowerMac 8500/180, when
I was getting ready to replace it with a PowerMac G4/450, as that’s when Apple dropped
floppy support.
I need to assess just what I have for PC Floppies, that I want to try to recover. At
least they *should* be easier to locate than what I’ve been working on so far.
Zane
When reading old floppies, how often is it
advisable to clean the drive? I managed the first 3.5” floppies no problem, I’m using a
USB Floppy Drive hooked up to my Mac Laptop, I was able to image them using “Disk
Utility”. The next two floppies have had errors. Though I think I was able to
successfully copy all the files off the one.
Also, what is floppy drive cleaning fluid made of, and how well does it age? I know I’ve
got at least a couple cleaning floppies around here, but they’re *OLD*.
I avoid Disk Utility like the plague.
dd works great, although MacOS's device naming is stupid. "diskutil list"
will show you what the floppy device is, and "sudo diskutil unmountdisk diskX"
will free it for imaging.
If you can source a Blue Pill, though, you can handwire it to a floppy drive and run the
greaseweazle tools...
https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/wiki/Blue-Pill-Direct
Good luck!
Doc