rrkhh

Hi, i'm helping a lady at church.she has a very OLD mac maybe 25 yrs old, a square box with about a 12 inch screen.well it works fine but someone gave me a IMAC G3 which i added memory and gave it to her. i now nothing about macs.i bought a external floppy drive for her and i went over today to set it up.she has many floppy's from the OLD mac that is a book she is writing.the G3 won't read the floppy's it wants to initialize the floppy which i guess would format and loose her book. QUESTION--is it possible to get the G# to read the floppy's from the OLD mac

HELP learning daily----robert

ebackhus

A 25 year-old Apple would be a Lisa.

Is this one of the all-in-one Macs with the colored case? If so, then it likely has OS 9.2 loaded. I'm not sure exactly on backwards compatibility on OSs, but assuming the disk is OK it ought to read.

sinclair_tm

no, what ever you do, do not let it initialize the floppies!!!!!!! it will in fact erase all her info. the problem is this. the old, old macs used a variable speed floppy drive. pcs, and usb floppy drives are single speed drives that will either read one or 2 sides. and that old mac was made before high density disk drives, so it can not read or write to them, and the new drive can't spin at the slower speed to read the old low density disk. and the hardware and software of that older mac doesn't know how to use a high density disk drive either. the only thing you can do to convert the disks to something the imac can read is to find a "middle mac" (something between the old mac and the imac) with a built in floppy drive. and i'd find one with a ethernet connection too to make life the easiest. but if it doesn't thats ok. any powerpc mac, quadra, or performa will fit the bill. apple used variable speed disk drives up to the day they quit using floppy disk drives. once high density floppies became the norm, they used variable speed drives that could read them, and still read the old floppies too. what you will have to do is stick the old floppy in the "middle mac" and copy it to the hard drive. now stick in a floppy the imac can read and copy the files to it and then you can copy the files off that floppy to the imac. you should be able to get somewhere between 2-4 of the old floppies to fit on the newer ones. if the "middle mac" has an ethernet port, you can connect it to the imac that way, and then have it share the folder you copy the files too from the old floppies and copy the files over the network to the imac. so basically, without a "middle mac" there isn't anything you can do.

where are you located?

rrkhh

Thanks for the reply,that gives me the solution.now i know what i need to find

thanks again........... robert my location is nashville,tn area...

sinclair_tm

well, i'm on the west coast, so i don't know where you could go to get one, other than ebay. but you could try school surpluses or thrift shops. thats where i got most of my older macs.