3.5 floppy drive compatible with iOS Big Sur 11.5.1

I believe apple stopped supporting old filesystems from Classic MacOS and previous OS X drivers that most Macintosh floppy disks drives use, Disk Utility will try to mount it and fail because it doesn't know how, unfortunately. It would be nice to have that back. Maybe virtual machine or other software can do it? It may install floppy/usb drivers that will work in older OS versions or perhaps windows?

rmjp wrote:

Has anyone found an external 3.5 inch floppy drive that will read 1.44Mb floppy disks on a MacBook Pro running Big Sur? I am seeking the details of one that you have used and know works please.

There are many available on Amazon and I have a TEAC FD-05PUB on loan from a friend that does not appear on the desktop when a floppy is inserted. The light comes on, the disk whirrs but the MacBook won't mount it on the desktop.

I used the Terminal app and entered the command diskutil list and it appears as disk2 in the "external" devices. So the computer can see it. I can also get the information in the attached image. I cannot get a directory list for the disk. I have about 30 floppies I want to extract data from before disposing of them. Any help will be greatly appreciated. I wish I had kept an old Imation drive or old Mac :-(

Cheers

Romina

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/951fa492-ddad-4f3d-8ebc-fa8816272e0e

Maybe a local Macintosh Computer club—with members who are computer buffs of the vintage and obsolete hardware would be able to assist you.... In this case search around.

Macintosh Computer Users groups | Meetup

Macintosh User Group - Wikipedia

Apple User Groups

Find a Group | Apple User Group Resources