No support for floppy disks under Snow Leopard?

I do have a USB flash drive, and yes, they are very useful. Unfortunately, that does not answer my question. I would like to know why or if Apple has discontinued the kind of support for external floppy drives that would allow me to write to a floppy disk? Is there some driver that needs to be installed on my new computer? I do still have the CD that came with the USB Slim Floppy Drive I originally bought back when Macs stopped having internal floppy drives. I don't remember if I had to install some driver when I was using this floppy drive with my G5 iMac running Tiger. Maybe that's all I need to do. Can anyone help me? Thanks!

Kristy

I know that is why Apple dropped floppy drives from their computers, but they did still support for many years, external floppy drives. Snow Leopard still does recognize my floppy drive, and allows me to read disks, and even has the icon for a floppy disk when I insert one into the drive. It just no longer lets me write to a disk, which is inexplicable, since up to a few months ago, I was able to both read & write to floppies with my old G5 iMac running Tiger. I still wonder if something is missing that I need to install, in order to be able to write to my floppies.

Kristy

Excuse me, but I did not say I was using Lion. I have a new iMac purchased in February 2011 that is running 10.6.8, Snow Leopard. I also have Rosetta installed on that. All I wanted to know is why Snow Leopard is allowing me to read my floppy disks from my external floppy drive, and NOT let me write to floppy disks. It seems really strange. It still has something in the OS that recognizes floppies. I do have other options for backing up files. That is not the issue. I just wanted a simple answer to a rather simple question, but I cannot find anything on Apple's support website about why they would no longer let me write to a floppy disk, even though they recognize floppy drives and disks.

Kristy

Yeah, well, that's why I thought maybe someone on a forum would maybe still have a floppy disk drive and know the answer to my question. But you're probably right--they've been abandoned for so long that no one has one anymore. I probably wouldn't get anywhere talking to an Apple tech support person either. Oh well. So I've got another useless piece of computer machinery.

Well, that is the kind of thing I was hoping to hear from someone. I did try several disks, but will try a few more. If I can't figure this out, I will probably call Apple. Thanks so much for letting me know that even in Lion there is still support for a floppy drive.

I lucked out, and a tech support person from Macally, the people who produced my floppy disk drive, responded with the answer to my problem. He explained that with an Intel Mac running Snow Leopard, and most likely Lion also, the only formatting on a floppy disk that the computer would recognize was Mac OS Extended, not Standard formatting. I checked all the disks that had been giving me problems, and even some blank ones that I had, and sure enough, they were all formatted with Mac OS Standard formatting. So I reformatted a blank disk with Mac OS Extended formatting in Disk Utility, and then I was able to both read and write to the disk. Whew! That was a big relief. I do know that floppy drives and floppy disks are almost useless, but I do still have a large number of them with information I need to probably move somewhere else for safe keeping. But it's nice to know that for small files, I could still just pop in a floppy disk and save it, if I needed to. Just wanted to update this post, so you all knew what the answer to my problem was.

I have a bit of an update to the situation since I originally posted this problem. Even though I did find out that I could reformat my floppy disks as Mac OS Extended, and still use my floppy drive, I rescued all the files from my old floppies and saved it to another source, old 250 MB Zip Disks. Then I upgraded my iMac to Mac OS Lion, and found another situation. I no longer was able to format floppy disks at all with Disk Utility. The only way it would let me format disks was with the old DOS format, and then I could still write to them, which makes no sense to me. For some reason, now it will not let me format floppy disks with Mac OS Extended format so that I can write to them. I can still read them, but it looks like floppies are finally pretty useless with the current Mac operating system. I'm glad that I was able to rescue all the files that I needed.

Kristy