No Floppy Drive Support in OS X??

N

Nachohat

je suis donc je pense
Say it ain't so!! I really hope I'm wrong. I've tried everything to get my Floppy Drive working on my Beige G3 in OS X 10.1.1 but now I'm beginning to wonder if Apple just abandoned Floppy Drive support. My computer is one of the only computers that has a built in Floppy drive and supports OS X.

Please help!
 
What!!!! This is horrible! There is not way to make it work? This is the familly computer and we are 6 using it! No disk = back to OS 9 on this computer.

Nooooooooooo! Aren't there any free drivers out there somewhere? There must be a way! Please! Noooooooooooooo :eek: :confused: :(
 
So far I haven't heard of any hack to get the internal floppy back to work under X.....unfortunately :(

The solution for now is to get a USB card and a USB floppy drive. Cost you $100 bucks total

BTW.....the last time I was using the floppy disk was when I was still doing my graphic stuff with the Performa 5200.....then in 1998 I got the beige G3...but I used Zip disks all the time....never touched the floppy drive.
 
My old Performa 5300's disk drive has already died, sending out loud cracking noises. But I don't care; I think I'll never have to use floppy disks again in this life.... :)

If ur floppy disks really are so important for u, y don't u just burn all of them onto a cd, and then use the cd wit os x? :)
 
Dradts --

I imagine that some might not have or be able to afford cd-r drives. Plus, a lot of people (though not me) still use floppies to exchange small files/data, etc.


Strangely, my expansion bay VST floppy drive now *works* in my Powebook G3 lombard... it didn't under earlier versions of X...
 
Here at Penn State Abington, we have Beige G3's in one lab. It is our only lab, and now that 10.1 is free to all dept.'s through MOC, I was hoping I could convince the people in charge to just order more RAM for the machines (now have 96MB) and then I could get macOS x on them, but the thing these macs are currently used most for is their floppy drives: people whose disks no longer work on PC's can often rescue their data on a Mac. Now, in Mac OS x, the hordes of average idiots still using floppies instead of em@iling data to themselves or using Zip disks (which the G3's don't have) would have even less of a reason to use the Macs, letting James Foreman get one step closer to replacing them with PCs. The rest of the Campus is hooked on Windows, this is our last stand, and this is a hard blow from Apple.
 
I foresee floppies going out of style anyways soon on the PC front too.

I just dont see a practica purpose for floppies!


Admiral
 
I have a single customer who still gives me data on floppy. I have an old mac we use to get the data off, then transfer over the network. While this is a bit inconvenient, it works, but I'd prefer to buy a USB floppy to use with my iMac. What ones work with X? Imation..? What other ones are there?
 
if I spent the $$$ for a floppy I would get a super floppy... at least it could use fuperfloppy disks of 140Mb ;)
 
I'm using the Imation external SuperDisk drive, which uses floppy-sized disks holding 120MB of data (they can also utilize the old 1.4MB floppies).
I don't use the supers all that often, but they are handy when I want to update a backup file without erasing and rerecording a CDRW.
:p
 
I wonder if standalone Darwin supports floppy drives... If it does, maybe you could just copy the floppy disk kernel extenstion from a Darwin install over to OS X.

Interesting that the floppy on you Lombard has started to work again, brachiator. Is that a third party thing, or did it come with the computer? That may be a promising sign that Apple is not listening to the "Floppies are the past, just spend hundreds of dollars on USB gadgets if you must use them" crowd.
 
I don't use floppy disks. I don't like them. I never have. They break easily and those metal things snap off inside of disk drives. Ouch!

I do, however have an external USB floppy drive on this iMac since I do have some older stuff on floppy that I had no way of backing up digitally, since my Compaq and PowerMac 8100 are the only 2 things I have with floppy drives, and the PowerMac's floppy drive is half dead, and the Compaq runs WIndows.. so that wouldn't work out too well.

I guess if you're a long time computer user, it may be good to have an external floppy drive just to recover old data, however I can't see any practical use for them in this day of 100 MB disks and 100 Megabits per second network connections.

If you want some free slow, small storage space, go to Finder and Go > iDisk. :)
 
The only floppies I have left are sentimental floppies :p (sentimental reasons :p)

* Amiga OS floppies
* Applle IIgs floppies from when I programmed with em
* High School Floppies with doc that I already have on CD :p


Admiral
 
The idisk wouldn't allow me to get files off a floppy that one of my customers brings me. I'll check out the VST and others listed on the Apple site. Thanks for the suggestions. I don't care about the super disks. I have a zip and a CD-RW for backup.. and I haven't used the zip in over a year. Just need something to take files off floppys under Mac OS X and that's it.
 
I know floppy drives are obsolete but that is really not my problem. I have my own Titanium Powerbook G4 and an external Firewire CD burner. Believe me, I know the value of a CD!

I'm a computer engineering student. My brothers are all younger than me and they are in high school. The beige G3 is used as the familly computer and as an internet Router. It used to have IpNetRouter installed on it but it just kept crashing so when I installed X on my Ti, I decided I would do the same on the beige. I finally wrote a UNIX script to get the routing working.

My brothers always use floppies to transfer data around from school, home and friends houses. I guess they could use a CDRW but it gets complicated because they don't have burners at their school and at their friends houses.

My problem is that I have lots of programs to give in for school. They all need to be given in on floppy disks (being in Comp Engineering, I have to do this at least once a week).

I guess I will try to find Mac OS 9 drivers somewhere. I could try to tweak them for OS X.

By the way, Floppy Disk is still the correct term for these disks. Remember that event though there is a rectangular case, inside there is a 3.5'' floppy disk. There are also those huge floppy disks that are big like a cd, but I'm too young to have ever used one.

So is anyone up for some homemade Floppy Drive OS X drivers?? :D
 
fuperfloppy? i want a fuperfloppy!!! sffounds fabulouff!

hey, since os x is unix based, does it support paper tape readers? card punches? ;)
 
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