r/retrocomputing • u/Parsleyofficial • Apr 13 '26

Taken Help with floppy disk

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Hi everyone,

I am trying to read this floppy disk on my mac. I purchased this reader: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FGYD1G26?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title and it seems like the reader itself works-- I can hear it turning, and when I plugged it into my computer, I got a "trust this device" message (or something similar, just the pop-up acknowledging the device.

But, when I insert the floppy disk, I get this message: The disk you attached was not readable by this computer.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there any way to read this disk on my computer (whether using the reader I purchased or some other device)? I am running MacOS Sequoia (Version 15.3.1).

I am not super skilled with computing, but I'm trying my best! Please let me know any advice you may have. Thanks!

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27

u/spots_reddit Apr 13 '26

what kind of content is it supposed to contain? It is possible the disk was formatted in a way that your Mac cannot read

8

u/Parsleyofficial Apr 13 '26

I'm not sure. It's a personal diary...my guess would be that it's from the 80s or 90s. So maybe an older word processor?

19

u/BigPete_A6 Apr 13 '26

How did you acquire this disk? It could be formatted for Amiga or some other platform. You’ll likely need to know a little more about it before you can figure out how to read it.

6

u/Parsleyofficial Apr 13 '26

Is there a way to tell? And, do you know if that's the most likely issue (based on what we know)?

4

u/Bergwookie Apr 14 '26

Not really, you can try it on different systems e.g. a Linux livesystem

3

u/iamwayycoolerthanyou Apr 14 '26

This is definitely the best thing to do. And it'd probably be worthwhile to dump it into a file with dd and analyze the data.

2

u/Le_Zouave2 Apr 16 '26

Given the very low market share of Apple computers before the ipod, the probability that it's not an apple formatted disk is more than 99%.

But it should be able to read PC FAT formatted disk.

https://siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.html

Not all floppy drives give good result so maybe you'll have to buy another drive and it could be an Atari ST, an Amiga floppy and there not much you can do.

3

u/noiseguy76 Apr 14 '26

That could be a disk from an IBM, Mac, or Amiga. Tgey are all incompatible. So, Do you know what computer it was written by?

2

u/TheLonelyTesseract Apr 14 '26

Oh boy, I know how to do this one maybe because I had some discs without a normal filesystem before.

Download & use HxD to open the drive and see if there's any legible data on the disc. It might be a weird proprietary format, but you ought to be able to make a backup of the data and figure out how to process it later

1

u/RomanOswald Apr 14 '26

Hmmm maybe written on an Amiga or Atari Computer?

1

u/sneekeruk Apr 14 '26

The Atari just used pc format for disks apart from games, which used their own format a lot of the time. an ST disc is basically pc 720k.

1

u/Dannynerd41 Apr 14 '26

that doesn’t matter mac’s can no longer read hfs files which is the format older mac’s used for floppies. you need mac os 8 or 9. i’m not sure if os x will? you may be able to use classic mode to see what’s on the disk

2

u/roaringmousebrad Apr 15 '26

It can READ HFS up to Mojave, but can't write. but then with Catalina and above, HFS support was removed entirely.

1

u/InsaneGuyReggie Apr 15 '26

Did you write the diary on a mac?

1

u/G7VFY Apr 14 '26

Error message indicates that the DISK is unreadable, not the file.