OSX won't recognize G3's floppy drive

Question

Level 1

14 points

OSX won't recognize G3's floppy drive

Hi, I recently upgrated my G3/300 beige tower to OSX 10.2.8 and it won't recognize my floppy drive. It's a pain to reboot in OS 9.2 just to access files I have stored on floppy disks. I don't necessarily want to transfer these files to cds or my hard drive.

Is there a fix for this? Any help would be appreciated...

Thanks,
Fred

G3 300 beige tower, Mac OS X (10.2.x), two hard drives

Posted on Dec 14, 2005 3:13 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Dec 14, 2005 4:03 PM in response to Fred Smith

Unfortunately, OS X does not (and never has) supported floppy drives.

Reply

Answer 2

Al2teach

Level 5

4,185 points

Dec 14, 2005 7:00 PM in response to Fred Smith

you could pick up an external floppy drive like Imation Super Drive from ebay or something and they should be super cheap. mine still works great.

Reply

Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Dec 14, 2005 8:04 PM in response to Al2teach

If it's USB it won't work on a Beige G3 - no USB ports.

Reply

Answer 4

Fred Smith Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 16, 2005 9:35 AM in response to Al2teach

you could pick up an external floppy drive like
Imation Super Drive from ebay or something and they
should be super cheap. mine still works great.

Are you using an external floppy drive with OSX? My G3 has a USB card so I could go thid route if the OS would support it. What I don't understand is why, if the OS will recognize an external floppy drive, it won't recognize an internal floppy drive? Thanks for all the suggestions.
Fred

G3 300 beige tower Mac OS X (10.0.x) OS X 10.2.8, 384mb ram, USB and Firewire cards

Reply

Answer 5

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Dec 16, 2005 11:29 AM in response to Fred Smith

Internal floppy drive is on a different inteface for which OS X has not installed drivers. The external floppy uses a different interface - USB - for which OS X does install drivers.

Reply

Answer 6

Al2teach

Level 5

4,185 points

Dec 22, 2005 9:07 PM in response to Fred Smith

I'm using the imation super drive when I need to store something small and don't want to waste a cd. sorry for the delay, the machine was in the shop getting an internal cd-dvd rom drive since the next OS will no doubt be on dvd.

Reply

Answer 7

Kurt Lang

Level 9

68,726 points

Dec 23, 2005 9:03 AM in response to Fred Smith

Hi Fred,

Another thing you could do is make disk images of all your floppy disks while booted into OS 9. Put all of them on a CD so you don't have to do that part again. Then when you're in OS X, you can access any of those floppy disk images without the need for the physical drive.

Reply