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How to format a floppy disk for old macs
How to format a floppy disk for old macs




I am not sure if you can do it with the Iomega drive especially since its USB, you would probably have to take it apart to do the next option.Īccording to this forum there is a way to control a floppy drive to get it to read those 400/800K disks. Most over-formatting utilities don't handle ED disks, as the format never gained much popularity.It looks like you are going to need to use an older Mac to read the disks, due to the complexities involved with the variable speed drives used to format those disk, unless you want to re-program your floppy drive. Current archiving tools like Winimage also support disks with increased capacity. Even Microsoft made use of this by introducing the DMF format (1.68 MB) for distributing software on disks. Well known tools are fdformat (fdread), vgacopy (vgaread). By loading a small TSR-driver such formatted disks could be used like the normal 1.44 MB formatted disks in DOS. Software utilities appeared that could format disks to higher capacities like 1.72 MB. In the 1990s the demand for higher capacities increased.

how to format a floppy disk for old macs

On older Macs the DD disks formatted to around 820 KB, and on Amiga 880 KB. On PC's, DD disks were usually (DOS-)formatted to 720 KB (though in practice it had about 714 KB of usable space), HD disks formatted to 1.44 MB (in practice it was around 1.38 MB) and the uncommon 2.88 MB disks (primarily used in IBM PS/2s) formatted to around 2.76MB. Like earlier floppies, there were many different ways to format a disk, often depending on what type of computer the disk was formatted with. Despite the more rugged design, 3.5 inch floppy drives tend to to be less reliable due to their compact nature.ģ.5" floppies came in three different densities (easily distinguished by a second hole on the side) and while only the earliest disks were single sided, almost all 3.5" floppies can be written to on both sides. The disks are housed in a stiff casing, opposed to the "floppy" plastic the 5.25" disk was housed in.

how to format a floppy disk for old macs

This format was designed to be smaller than the 5.25" floppy drive and its media and fixed some of the 5.25" design problems.






How to format a floppy disk for old macs