Transferring Appleworks files from IIgs to Macintosh

Does your cousin have a 3.5 inch diskette drive? If so, many Macs with a Built-in 3.5 inch diskette drive will read those disks directly as ProDos disks, provided the right extensions are available on the Mac.

What Mac do you have available, and which Mac OS is running?

That will get the files to the Mac. Do you know what program you would like to open them? Do you have AppleWorks for the Mac available?

Kieth,

Try to reverse the process. Can you format a PRO-DOS floppy in the G3 and then see if the IIGS will recognize it?

I frequently have to move from one machine to the next until I find a pair of floppy drives that have the same read head tolerances. Some drives work fine for floppies they format but do not want to read a floppy formatted in another drive.

If you have an old Mac Plus or SE, try reading the disk in one of them. Also try formatting a floppy in one of those older machines. Once you have those files onto a Mac with a SCSI hard drive and can get away from floppy issues, you can transfer files to a external HDD, zip drive or share those files via ethernet to a new machine, modem to the web, or burn a CD, etc.; you can take the data anywhere.

I have one each of every possible Apple or Mac and I still run into trouble with reading floppies. Getting the files into new software is easy compared to hardware grief. Good luck.

Jim

External floppy can not read the physical format used by the Apple IIgs. It really must be a Built-In floppy drive, like in a beige G3 or older.

So sorry, I missed the beige G3 on first reading.

No specific extensions needed to read and format floppies. I think part of the "other file systems" support may be included in the CD Player and extensions, including Foreign File Access, Photo Access, and ISO 9660 access, which do not get identified individually in Extensions Manager.

Starting with a new diskette, can that drive format as a ProDOS disk, copy [any old] files, and read them back? If not, you may have to clean the Beige G3's diskette drive.

I doubt that the extensions or control panels the Apple IIe card uses are integrated into Mac OS 9.2.2 considering not all Macs even had a PDS slot to begin with. Try downloading that via this link: <a href-"http://download.info.apple.com/AppleSupport_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Apple_II/For_Macintos h/Apple_IIe_Card2.2.1.sea.bin.">Downloads One of the extensions or control panels should be able to read a ProDOS formatted disk (if the IIgs formats it as ProDOS).

I honestly don't think you need anything from Apple IIe card support. The formatting is supported directly in the Operating System.

I just tried it on my Quadra 840AV running Mac OS 8.1. It was happy to erase diskettes and reformat as ProDOS disks -- 800K or 1.4 MB automatically according to disk type (2D or HD). That Mac has never seen any Apple II software. The ProDOS choice was right underneath the MSDOS Choice.

Why else then would a Mac attempt to erase a ProDOS formatted floppy? To me that alone doesn't seem to make any sense at all whatsoever. I wonder if the IIgs is formatting the disk in some proprietary format only it can utilize...

>"Why else then would a Mac attempt to erase a ProDOS formatted floppy?"

1) G3 drive is dirty
2) G3 drive has a major dust bunny inside and mechanism is stuck at track 00
3) G3 drive is slightly different calibration than the original drive, and can't quite line up the data to read it.
4) diskette is damaged
5) diskette data has gone bad over time
6) diskette has been fingerprinted
7) diskette is wrong type (2D or HD), hole has been taped over or new hole has been punched

I tried those two ProDOS-formatted diskettes in a 5500 running 9.2.2 using the built-in diskette drive.

The first one I inserted came up unreadable. I ejected it and inserted it again and it mounted on the desktop with a cute Apple-II rainbow Icon. The files were shown, but their Icons were blank document Icons (the Applications that owned the files were not installed on that Mac).

The second diskette mounted without incident, showed the distinctive Icon, and showed blank Icons for the copied files.

Options to format as MS-DOS or ProDOS disks were available in 9.2.2 for either type (2D or HD).

I can only assist Grant. Got no problems transporting text-data from IIgs/System 6 to even my old SE.Further on with system 6 the IIgs can read,write and initialize disks in HFS format if the HFS File System Translator is installed(mine has).
My PM 7600/OS 9 accepts disks from the IIgs(tested five different including chessmaster program).
Test wether the MAC can do all this is easy:Insert an old DSDD disk(one hole) in the drive and try to format.You should then get the ProDOS 800k or MSDOs 720k possibilities.

According to description if the same disk of IIGs was first used in a USB-1,44 MB drive,then on the G3, the disk may have been damaged this way.You can achieve this even with disk made protected against writing.
There is the possibility to connect the IIGs with LocalTalk to an older MAC with serial port to transport the files without using floppies-then it goes with MacMan!

Craigwd,

Grant gives an excelent list of what ifs.

We place too much trust in old equipment and media. I left an LC 550 out in the rain and snow for a year, brought it back inside and turned it on. Everything about it workedfine the very first time except the floppy drive. It was dusty. That's all. (And a little rust on the exposed tin.)

The more computers and drives and floppy disks you try, the greater chance you have of two machines reading the same disk.

Grant commented on the limitations of external drives. If you connect an external drive to the IIGS and format a disk. Copy some files. Move that external drive to an SE or a IIci with an external floppy port. Move the data to a hard drive. Format a floppy in the internal FDHD 'super drive' and copy files to it. Take that floppy to a G3 and hopefully the G3 drive will read it. No one machine will do it all without a really lucky match of drive heads and drive tolerances. Why else would I keep hundreds of junker macs? lol.

Extensions and software issues only come into play after the read heads and other drive hardware components work properly. Sony designed the High Density floppy drives for 2 meg but they were only marketed at 1.4 meg - I think because that gave more reliable reads.

Jim

Guys, isn't there potentially one other issue in transferring from the old floppies? I forget the exact details, but at some point the Mac floppy drives stopped being able to read 400K MFS diskettes: I don't recall if it was because of the operating system or the hardware (floppy drive design) or both. I do know that I can only read any ancient 400K diskettes only in the floppy drives of a MacSE or Plus. This may not be significant to the IIgs floppies, but could it relate to which older Mac Keith might want to try to use?