Archiving floppies [Was: Squeak History... don't forget the Levco Prodigy! :-)]

Andrew P. Black black at cse.ogi.edu
Wed Apr 23 04:16:30 UTC 2003


At 8:33 AM -0800 3/18/03, Jack Johnson wrote:
>You might know all of this, but if you're looking for a good way to 
>archive 800k floppies you come across (as the old timers start 
>rooting through their closets), there are two (similar) methods I 
>can suggest.

I recently decommissioned my last Mac with an internal floppy drive. 
Before I did so, I read all of the floppy disks that I could find in 
the house onto my hard drive.

OS X does not support the internal floppy drive at all.  It supports 
USB floppy drives, but these drives do not have auto eject, and do 
not read 800k disks.

The best program that I found, under OS9, is "Shrinkwrap".  You can 
set Shrinkwrap into batch mode, where it will read a disk, create an 
image file, eject the disk and ask for a new one, all without 
keyboard or mouse intervention.  This program is what made it 
feasible to copy all of those disks without driving myself crazy. 
Shrinkwrap does not seem able to mount the resulting images any more 
under OS9, but Apple's disk copy will do so.



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