Re: Reading old IIe floppies without Apple Hardware

["Polymorph" <polymorph69@hotmail.com>]

Brayton wrote:
> I have a box of 5¼" 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?

well, if you have access to 5.25" drives for your current windows PC,
you might want to take a look at:

http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/

As far as I understand it, this software is capable of reading old
Apple II images using PC style drives and saving the result as a disk
image. I suspect it won't work on all Apple II disks. However, if the
disks you have are mainly unprotected, you could be in luck.

Failing that, you are probably going to need to find someone in your
area with a real Apple II, or post the disks to someone who does. I'm
not sure if old Mac's can read Apple II 5.25" disks? I know they can
read the 3.5" variety.

There *may* be specialist data retrieval companies out there dealing
with these disks, but I doubt it. Even if there were, I suspect they
would be rather expensive.

cheers,
-p