At 02:16 -0500 11/17/2005, John Tamine wrote:
thanks all for the replies on the siig pci / ata question. and now for a VERY STUPID question. is it possible to connect an old 5 1/4" IDE floppy (pulled from an old, old, 386) to a pci/ata card in a mac and get it to work? anyone ever heard of it being attempted?
It won't work because there is no appropriate interface card available, I believe.
However, there was a card for the Macintosh SE which allowed one to connect an Apple 5.25" drive. That's Apple as in Apple II, Apple IIe, Apple IIGS, not Apple as in Apple Macintosh. I'm not sure whether those old Apple 5.25" drives could also read PC 5.25" drives or not. I think that they could, because old Apple machines could run some flavor of DOS or CPM, couldn't they?
Another option is to get a Mac LC or other machine with the LC PDS slot (Quadra 605 is a really nice choice) and install the Apple IIe LC/PDS card. That puts an Apple IIe in your LC PDS equipped Mac and it has a connector on the back for a special cable which will connect to the Apple 5.25" drive. That means that if you get the IIe card, you need to make sure you get the cable with it. It's a special cable that branches out into connectors for video, external floppy drive and joystick.
The easiest thing, if you just want to transfer data from old PC 5.25" disks, is to keep the 386 around (heresy, I know) and make sure it has a High Density 3.5" drive installed. Copy your 5.25" disks to 3.5" disks and then any Mac Beige G3 or older will read the 3.5" disks (except the Mac Plus, and un-upgraded Mac II and Mac SE).
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