TR Forums

Hey everyone,

I've been working to transfer about 500 Mac-formatted floppy disks to my PC in an effort to archive about 20 year's worth of my college's newspaper backup. I've passed the 400 mark using MacDrive on Windows 7, but there seem to be a stack of around 100 that will not seem to work. Some of the floppies are almost 20 years old, but I'm wondering if the format for the older disks are not one that MacDrive can read.

Does anyone have suggestions for getting the information off the disks?

Thanks in advance!

You're not going to like this, but odds are those backups are no longer readable - floppies were never very stable, in some cases even just five years would be pushing it. What types of floppies are these *exactly*? 3.5"? DD or HD?

You might have better odds using a different physical drive - some are better with borderline readable floppies than others. If you use an old drive, make sure to test it with something that's not important first!

Yeah, I would try with multiple drives. Floppies were not exactly known for having precise track alignment; sometimes with marginal discs you just need to get lucky and find a drive that manages to pull those old degrading bits off.

My recommendation is to try an get your hands on an LS120 or LS240 drive. Those floptical drives are much better at reading data from old barely readable disks. You should be able to find them on ebay in USB versions.

Adi