[SOLVED] How Might I Read Mac OS8/9 Floppy Discs?

[Anlace]

Greetings,

I have a pile of floppy discs from a client, he asked if I might be able to pull the files off of them. They were created in Mac OS 8 and 9. What do I need to install to be able to mount and read these things?

Thanks for any and all help ;-)

Peace,
Gail

[Cheesehead]

Get ready for adventure!

In Synaptic, look for the packages 'hfsplus' to mount a mac hfs+ disk.
If an older hfs disk, try 'hfsutils'.

Add them and try your disks.
If the disk doesn't mount, try using the mount command:

sudo mkdir /media/macdisk
sudo mount -t /dev/fd0 /media/macdisk

Let us know the crazy errors and failures is as much detail as you can so we can help....

[Anlace]

Ok, here we go . . . .

sudo mount didn't work at all so I tried mounting via KDE/Dolphin. I got the error message


mount: wrong fs type, bad superblock on /dev/fd0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error in some cases useful info is found in syslog -try dmesg | tail or so


gail@gail-kde:~$ dmesg | tail
[ 433.687279] hfs: unable to parse mount options.
[ 560.074030] hfs: unable to parse mount options.


Almost forgot to mention that I used Synaptic to install hfsplus, hfsprogs, hfsutils, hfsutils-tcltk, and libhsfp0.

Hmmm, I'll try another disc and see what happens. These could be hosed discs too since they are old as the hills.

Thanks for the help!

[Anlace]

So far no luck, same error as above or this one:


Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

I am thinking that the message above is coming from broken discs since they don't seem to be even trying to read (no floppy disc sounds).

[Cheesehead]

Next steps:

Is the hardware working?
Do other (non-mac) known good floppies work in the drive?
Is your floppy drive really located at /dev/fd0?

Is the software working?
If you have a mac disk that is known good, then successfully mounting it will be a great victory (known good hardware, functioning software, adequate settings)

If you have a blank, you might be able to create a good mac disk using the hfs utilities you installed, then unmount it, remount it, and check it.

Is it worth the hassle at all?
Have you, by chance, any convenient access to a mac with a working floppy drive to check the disks? If so, network access or a usb slot would save a lot of hassle...

[Anlace]

Is the hardware working?

Yes, it works fine so that means the drive mounts correctly for other discs (formatted and unformatted).


Is the software working?

Using hfsutils I am able to work with a known good floppy - formatted with hfs filesystem, added directories and files. Let's try again with the old ones because I may have learned something new here (heaven forbid).


Is it worth the hassle at all?

Maybe not so much to me but definitely to my client ;-)

[Anlace]

Ok this is as far as I am getting:


gail@gail-kde:~$ sudo hmount /dev/fd0 /media/MacFloppy
Volume name is "Homecoming"
Volume was created on Thu Aug 1 14:48:41 1996
Volume was last modified on Mon Apr 12 08:18:11 1999
Volume has 84992 bytes free


What I am struggling with is navigating to the floppy drive directory, viewing the files on it, and being able to copy them into a hard disc directory.

When I try hcopy this happens:


gail@gail-kde:~$ sudo hcopy /media/MacFloppy /share/Clients/Walt/Disc01
hcopy: "/media/MacFloppy": no such file or directory


I get this message for hcd too:


gail@gail-kde:~$ sudo hcd /media/MacFloppy
hcd: "/media/MacFloppy": no such file or directory


I can hear the floppy accessing but am not able to view files.

xhfs crashes when I try to access the floppy as well. I uploaded the crash info from the terminal if that helps.

[BUSHYBOB]

You can only read 1.4mb disks on a pc floppy drive, if they are 800kb or 400kb then you need a mac.

[Anlace]

Most of them appear to be 1.44 MB floppies. The one that I am currently working with (and posting messages about) is a 1.44 MB floppy.

Apple quit building floppy drives into their computers a long time ago, something like 2000. The oldest Mac that I have seen lately is the one in my office - a PowerMac G3 (AGP) and it does not have a floppy drive and the motherboard does not have a connector for one.

Will a USB external floppy drive work or will I have the same problems? I would think it'd make no difference.

[BUSHYBOB]

I have a Mac boot floppy which I can read on my Gutsy machine. On my laptop running Hardy Heron I can see the Disk by its disk name in the Places menu but when I try to open it I get an "invalid option" error. Strangely I have Basilisk on the laptop and when I ran it it booted from the floppy disk. Weird

[Anlace]

I got about 2/3 of the floppies to read enough to copy the contents off of them. The remainder were either 800k (or less) format or were bad.

After making the appropriate directory I was able to mount good disks using:

sudo mount /dev/fd0 /media/MacDisk

Heck of a way to spend the afternoon!

[no_way]

Hi Anlace,

I'm no Linux expert, but I did mount my Mac disks wth BasiliskII and Sheepshaver.
Maybe you might refer to this:http://www.emaculation.com/forum/
if you have problems installing a Mac emulator.

Best wishes!