Re: How can I determine if my floppy drive is dead?

On 2024-12-15 06:47:17 +0000, super70s said:

On 2024-12-15 04:52:01 +0000, Your Name said:

On 2024-12-15 01:39:41 +0000, super70s said:

On 2024-12-14 14:53:37 +0000, Sebastian P. said:

In article <vintageapplemac-1412240638060001@192.168.1.134>,
vintageapplemac@gmail.com (scole) wrote:

 In my rebuilt PM 9600, I have been unable to successfully mount a floppy disk since I put it all back together. Any disk I put in, within a second or so the "Disk Is Unreadable" or whatever error appears and asks if I want to initialise the disk, and many of these floppies mounted absolutely fine only a few months ago when my Performa was still operational.
 So, I'm leaning towards the drive being the issue. I do have 4 or 5 spare drives so I intend to try them all out, but I've had two drives so far behave in the same way. Is there any software test I can run to prove if the drive is operational? Could they need a clean? Would dismantling them and cleaning help???

 I've had this happening with floppy disk drives too. Exactly the same problem. I can, however, give you some hope - In both my cases, the reason was simply dirt inside the drive. Both drives do work again now.
 I'd take out the drive and open it up, then cleaned it with some pure alcohol and a cotton swab. I lubricated the moving parts and suddenly the thing started to read and mount disks again. It was sure great to see an original 1988 Mac SE floppy drive coming back to life!
 These floppy drives are much more reliable that they are usually credited for. Often it's just the dirt of decades leading to problems such as yours (another common one being brittle plastic gears breaking, but even these can be replaced)
 It's not hard to do. If you have no experience, watch some YouTube videos on the matter before you start. They will give you an idea on what to look for and what to avoid at all costs (e.g. bending the drive head too much)
 Good luck!

 Is it possible to mount a floppy drive on a system running OSX? I've tried that with two different external floppy drives I bought used on eBay and I always get a "not enough power" warning from the floppy drives, even though I tried plugging them directly into the USB port on the machine instead of a hub. I finally just gave up.

 It depends on the version of Mac OS X and the type of floppy disk.
 HD 1.44MB floppy disks mount fine on my Mac Mini running High Siera using a cheap no-name-brand USB floppy drive with a single USB plug via either the computer ports or a hub port.

 I only tried it on an MDD G4 running 10.4 Tiger, of course that machine is capable of booting into OS9 but I don't know if that would've made any difference in the power situation.
 

Older 400K and 800K floppy disks won't work since they require the special variable speed floppy drives that Apple used, rather than standard PC floppy drives. But in this case you would get a "disk not recognised" error.

 The overwhelming majority of my floppies are 1.44 MB, best I can remember. The last time I used them was on a Power Mac 5400 and 1.44's were pretty common by then.
 

If your drives truly aren't getting enough power, you could try a double plug cable. My external DVD-RW drive needs a double-plug cable to get enough power.

 My latest Mac is a mid-2014 iMac running Mojave 10.14, I never tried using the external floppies on it because I assumed if they wouldn't mount on the MDD G4 they wouldn't mount on it. I may try to use the external floppy drive on it. I have an external LG DVD drive I use on another Mac I have that came with the double plug cable but I never needed to use both plugs with it.
 The main thing is accessing the data on the old floppies, I don't care which machine I'm able to do it on.

According to this website, Mojave can read HFS and HFS+ floppy disks.
<https://siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.html>
It also has a list of USB floppy drives manufacturers that work with MacOS, but really any drive *should* work. (The drive manufacturer may of course differ to the maker of the box the drive is contained in, so without the original packaging or opening up the drive box, there's no easy way to tell what type is inside.)
It's a very detailed website by someone who used to work for Apple.
The only problem I have with my USB floppy drive is that it can be a bit s flakey at mounting a disk, but unplugging the drive and plugging it back in usually solves that.