> On Jan 8, 2023, at 7:41 PM, Doc Shipley via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> On 1/8/23 19:29, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
>> 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
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
