so unless im really unlucky whatever one i get should work just fine right?
No… But if you don't pay attention when someone is trying to tell you something, you'll just go around in circles until you start.
I said, "most any of them will work but…" what that means is they will
write and read back just fine BUT (now this this where you NEED TO PAY ATTENTION)
They will not - repeat
will not read old Mac formatted DD (dual density) disks! When I said 1.2Mb, I was misremembering. The original Apple HD disks were actually 800kb. To achieve that they used a CLV (constant linear velocity) format that
required the drive to spin at variable speed! The issue is NOT with the driver OR the filesystem - it's the way Steve Jobs, as usual, jumped the pack first in 1984 and crammed more data onto the same disks that everyone else was using, and damn the fact that it was incompatible with everything else. Sound familiar? In 1987, IBM spit up a new
1.44Mb format and said "Nyah nyah nyah" to Apple. Apparently, they were working so hard to get that together that they DIDN'T PAY ATTENTION EITHER when someone told them about those newfangled shiny disc things that were coming out that would hold a gazillion time as much…
READ THIS TWICE
If you have an old Mac 800k disk - and there are an awful lot of them - identifiable by a second square hole punched in the back opposite the write protect tab -
it can only be read by an old Apple drive or a later Apple (Sony) "Superdrive"If you stick one of them into the Teac or any other one of those little USB floppy drives that read 1.44 Mb disks, the system will just offer to format it for you.
Don't believe me? Ask Diehard.
If you have a 400kb disk or a 1.44Mb IBM-style disk from a sampler, it will probably work insofar as you'll see that there's data on it, but I'm not sure what it'll take to handle it since it
won't be using the HFS filesystem.Knez is doing just fine because I'll bet he doesn't have any old original Mac 800k disks to read. IF HE DOES AND THEY WORK in his Teac drive, I'll eat one. Seriously, I'll eat one and I'll post the video of it for you.
READ THIS AS MANY TIMES AS IT TAKES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_diskTHIS IS ALSO USEFUL
http://www.siber-sonic.com/mac/superfloppy.htmlBUT THIS PRETTY MUCH COVERS IT
http://www.siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.htmlAND FOR THE INSATIABLY CURIOUS
http://web.archive.org/web/20070506114354/http://home.socal.rr.com/fuweb/floppysite/index.html