Hello,
I have connected a USB external floppy drive to my Macbook Pro (OSX El Capitan).
I am unable to "view" the external drive, and hence unable to access the floppy content.
Any hint/Tip appreciated ! Thanks in advance.
O.K
PS : my purpose is to retrieve the content from a stack of old 3.5" floppies formatted under System 6.x and 7.x on a Mac SE30.
MacBook Pro
Your external floppy drive (provided it is hardware compatible) will not appear on your Desktop until you insert a readable floppy disk in it. That is how mine works on Mojave and earlier.
Unless your old System 6/7 floppies were formatted as FAT16 or FAT32, OS X El Capitan will not mount them. Maybe it can read an old HFS filesystem, but anything else will be an alien format this far into the future.
Hi VikingOSX, thank you for your note.
I can't remember in which format the floppies were formatted. This was 25+ years ago. Likely the floppies are in different formats, as some were in 800K and others in 1.4Mb and possibly in 400K...
For now, the device is not visible to the machine ; hence format issues, I believe, are NOT the problem YET. My penny :-)
When I plug in my 3.5 inch floppy drive, the only visual clue that it is recognized is a green light on the drive. It is only when I insert compatible media that it makes its typical floppy drive racket, and mounts the drive icon on the Desktop. Did this yesterday with some Excel spreadsheets from 1997. Only LibreOffice would open them.
All of my 3.5 inch floppy disks were written on a dual-boot Solaris-X86/Win95 Toshiba laptop from that era.
How to get USB external floppy drive mounted to OSX to read old Macintosh floppies (1990')
