How to read a HFS floppy disk in Mac OS Catalina

It's a good idea, except there are a fair number of old Mac data file formats that save all of their info to the resource fork, which does not copy from an old Mac to a PC. You end up with zero byte files.

Stuffit should work, though. Use Stuffit on the old Mac to create a .sit archive and copy that over to the new Mac. It could even be put on a DOS formatted floppy. Either the Stuffit Expander or The Unarchiver should be able to open it on the Catalina machine (both are available for free on the App Store).

What happens if you copy the files onto a PC-formatted (MS-DOS, FAT) 1.44 MB floppy disk instead, and then try to read it via a USB floppy drive connected to the modern iMac? Depending on the Macintosh Classic II operating system, either an Apple File Exchange program (look for it in a folder on a 7.0.1 or 7.1 Tidbits system disk) or a PC Exchange control panel (part of System 7.5.x) will be required in order to write to a PC floppy.

There were SCSI-to-Ethernet adapters from manufacturers such as Dayna, but these devices (and the necessary software) can be difficult to find. It may be easier to try to locate an appropriate semi-old (pre-1998) Macintosh computer with Ethernet, to be used as an intermediate machine. The connection between the Classic II and this semi-old Mac can be via LocalTalk (in its simplest form, a MiniDIN-8M to MiniDIN-8M printer cable between the printer ports).

>Harrumph! Certainly not.

:-)

The idea of having an (Internet-capable) Windows PC (with a floppy drive, Ethernet, and a serial port) as an intermediary may sound strange, but can actually be quite useful. For example, early versions of commercial Windows software like TransMac or MacDrive could handle HFS-formatted 1.44 MB floppy disks (a web search may even show details about an old freeware application called HFVExplorer). It is also possible to use an old PC to create a Mac-formatted floppy containing a ready-to-use StuffIt Expander installer. The PC could (using a special technique) create working/bootable Mac floppies from certain downloadable disk images. The serial port can be used with a suitable cable combination to create a null-modem link to the modem port of the Classic II. So, if you know someone with an old Windows (for example, XP) computer, you may want to buy or borrow it for some initial transfers in both directions.

:-)

Make disk images of the floppy drives on the old Mac. Email those images to yourself, or just copy the images across the network to the new Mac.

Hi,

First of all, which exact system version is installed on the Classic II?

The Tidbits diskette was one of the floppies in the System 7.0.1 or 7.1 set of disks. If you have one of these system versions, but not a set of floppies, have you checked whether the Apple File Exchange application possibly is somewhere on the hard disk (or if there is a set of system disk images there)? If System 7.5.x is installed, the PC Exchange control panel should be there (just make sure that it is in the right place, and active). With PC Exchange installed, Apple File Exchange is not used.

Yes, it may be worth testing the USB floppy drive with a Mac OS X 10.6 MacBook (the following article could perhaps be of interest in this context: https://siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.html).

Alternatively, do you have access to an old external serial dial-up modem (with a suitable modem cable for the Classic II modem port)? Do you have a communications program (such as the communications section in ClarisWorks, or a dedicated terminal emulation application) on/for the Classic II?

Also, do you have access to an older PC (perhaps running something like Windows 95 to XP) with a floppy drive, Ethernet, and a serial port?