Re: Reading old IIe floppies without Apple Hardware

["David A. Flory" <dafloryspamx@hotmail.com>]

Hi,

Your two best options would be to have a vintage computer hobbyist 
transfer the files for you, or else get the necessary hardware and do it 
yourself.

I have tried using utilities to read Apple II disks with on a PC with a 
 5 1/4" IBM DD/DS drive, and they can work, but only if the disks are 
perfect.  I had disks that could not be read on my IBM system that could 
be read by my IIgs.  The floppy technologies used by the PC and the 
Apple are completely different, and you really can only read Apple disks 
reliably with an Apple.

This is how I would transfer your diskettes.

1.  Copy your Apple 5 1/4" disks to 3.5" with my IIgs using System 
Utilities.

3.  Copy (Or make images) of the files with my Mac IIci (68K Macs 
running System 7.5 or 7.6 can read Apple disks)

3.  Write the images or files to IBM 1.44MB disks using the Mac IIci 
(68K Macs with System 7.5 or 7.6 can also write IBM disks!)

Hope this helps,

Dave


Brayton wrote:
> I have a box of 5�" floppies that were used in a IIe system back in the 
> late 80's / early 90's.  My boyfriend's mom passed away in 1989 and left 
> a number of disks behind.  The contents of the disks are a mystery, but 
> they would mostly be high school papers, etc.  (His mom was an English 
> teacher.)
>
> Is there any easy way to get the contents of the disks?  I was looking 
> through them briefly and one of them says, "Appleworks", on it.  Not 
> sure if it's the software or the documents.  I would love to be able to 
> read the contents and maybe convert them to disk images that can be used 
> in Windows, maybe even just print out what documents there are.
>
> What options are out there?