Does Mountain Lion no longer support external floppy drives?

Question

Level 1

0 points

Does Mountain Lion no longer support external floppy drives?

A couple years ago, I bought a portable USB powered external floppy drive, because I occasionally found 3.5 inch disks in storage that seemed to have still-useful stuff on them.

I've got Mountain Lion installed now, and just discovered that this external drive no longer works. It makes the usual whirring sounds, but the disk image doesn't appear on the desktop.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a solution, other than going back to an older OS X?

...Charles

G5 iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.5)

Posted on Dec 13, 2012 12:56 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Kurt Lang

Level 9

58,302 points

Dec 13, 2012 1:08 PM in response to cp_whaley

Check with the drive's manufacturer and see if they have a driver for ML.

Reply

Answer 2

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Dec 13, 2012 3:32 PM in response to cp_whaley

Not having seen a floppy disk since around 1998, I don't know the answer to your question, but if the drive doesn't work, you can always send the disks to a service bureau to be copied to a CD or flash drive.

Reply

Answer 3

userid42

Level 1

9 points

Jan 18, 2013 9:33 PM in response to cp_whaley

On my mid-2011 iMac running OS X 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion) I was trying to download and copy onto floppy disks (for an old Macintosh) some software downloaded from the internet. I have just purchased and am using a new generic USB 3.5" floppy drive.

I found that I could read such disks via a USB floppy disk drive but that I could not write to them.

It seems that such disk formats have only limited support in more recent versions of OS X.

There is software called MacDisk for Windows. I just ran it in Windows 7 running as my Bootcamp partition accessed via VMWare Fusion. The software is free to test (with some limitations).

I just successfully copied a file via it to a disk and then was able to read it on my iMac.

Hope this helps you, or anyone else looking to do such strange things.

Reply