So I figured all I really needed was a machine with an internal floppy drive, and some software that would allow me to image a disk, even if that computer couldn’t understand it. But I did read that a newer machine, despite not being able to read 400k MFS disks was able to write a disk image to one, and that disk could then be read on an older machine. Working machines with MacOS 7 would allow me to read MFS disks, but newer systems would not There are still powerbooks to be had on eBay that have internal floppy drives. I realized that I could restore my old Mac Plus from the dead as a virtual machine, and run the old software from my childhood.Įxcept I didn’t have those disks in a readable format… I bought a USB floppy drive that reads PC disks and 1.4 MB disks fine, but would not read my old 400k/800k for the reasons described elsewhere. Mini vMac, QEMU, and of course, VirtualBox). Until I discovered the rabbit hole that is emulation (e.g. No big deal, the data wasn’t that important….

So there was no longer any way to read those disks. Then Mac computers stopped coming with internal floppy drives, and then I realized that I no longer had any working computers with floppy drives. A while back I tried to copy as many of my important documents to my hard drives. Many of them have disappeared over the years, but a few survived. I still have a few of my old floppy disks sitting around. HFS disks can still be read, but cannot be written after 10.5.8 MFS disks could no longer be read after OS 7 So I won’t go into the details, but the short version is:Ĥ00k floppy disks were formatted using the Macintosh File System ( MFS)Ĩ00k disks were formatted using Hierarchical File System ( HFS)ġ.4 MB disks were formatted with HFS+, and can be read on “any” 3.5 inch floppy drive, not just Apple drives. There are other sites that do a great job describing the technical aspects of the early Mac floppy drives ( here and here). … until you need to try and access read those disks years later. Anything that allowed one to put an extra document on the disk was great! Which was great back then because swapping floppy disks back and forth was terrible. And a floppy drive that managed to squeeze 400k onto a disk that normally holds 360k. My family’s first computer was the original 128k Mac.

Mac drive reader