Internal floppy drive laptop to Mac compatibility ?

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Roarke
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Internal floppy drive laptop to Mac compatibility ?

Post by Roarke »

68kMLA Forums are in maintenance mode and i would like please someone to help me, because i got the chance to buy a internal floppy drive from some laptops and don't have much time. As i know by now, SuperDrive is a floppy drive which reads a 1.44 Mb floppy disk.
Is there compatibility isues if i use a internal floppy drive +5V from a laptop, besides the size ? I don't know what the small thin cable from a Powerbook 150 dead floppy drive is called. I guess the pins are numbered by counting the little lines ?
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Re: Internal floppy drive laptop to Mac compatibility ?

Post by adespoton »

You'd do better posting that on Reddit in r/VintageApple. There are, however, pinouts online for laptop floppy drives so you can line up the ribbon traces with the traditional pins. I seem to recall they're not in the same order as a desktop floppy drive.
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Re: Internal floppy drive laptop to Mac compatibility ?

Post by 24bit »

Never owned a PB.
Is that a printed foil flat ribbon cable? Looks like that at least.

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Could be it will be more promising to build a DB19 adapter for external Apple floppy or a flat ribbon adapter for a usual Apple internal floppy?
Floppy emu may be worth considering also, but its made for flat ribbon too:
https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/

Where in the world do you live Roarke?
Someone near your place could copy a bootable Mac OS onto your replacement pATA HDD maybe?
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Re: Internal floppy drive laptop to Mac compatibility ?

Post by Roarke »

Romania. I was trying to do this by myself, as i don't have anyone to contact for helping with a mac hdd instalation. The cable is thin white color, not like in a hdd cable (orange color) on a Mac or like a IDE floppy drive cable on a PC.
My dead floppy drive is 3.5 inch.


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Re: Internal floppy drive laptop to Mac compatibility ?

Post by 24bit »

So its a ZIF floppy cable.
Is there a logic board that you might possibly swap with another Apple Superdrive?

For hacking together some floppy adapter, you want the pinout of an "Apple Floppy Drive Cable 821-0655", but I´m clueless where to find one.

Which other PCs do you have access to?
If you could find an Intel Core2Duo with a GMA 950 graphics (like the Lenovo T60) you might use Snow Leopard and dd to prepare your PB´s HDD.
Almost any other old C2D rig with say a PCIe ATI HD5450 GPU should do too for OSX 10.6 or better.
Really a long shot, I know.

Edit 1:
Just saw a Berlin ebay seller offering 40GB pATA 2.5 HDDs for small money.
Should I grab one, put MacOS 7.5.5 on it and mail it to your place?

Edit 2:
There is a PB floppy drive for sale in Germany:
https://www.ebay.de/itm/Apple-Macintosh ... rk:28:pf:0
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Roarke
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Re: Internal floppy drive laptop to Mac compatibility ?

Post by Roarke »

Edit 1:
Just saw a Berlin ebay seller offering 40GB pATA 2.5 HDDs for small money.
Should I grab one, put MacOS 7.5.5 on it and mail it to your place?
Thank you, but i already bought a Toshiba 6007 Mb IDE, three fat32 partition. I made a thread, but is down :
https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/to ... rbook-150/
If i accept your offer, how much i would pay ? Thank you for the floppy drive link. I gonna tell you if i will buy from him.

I bought a pc the other day, it could have that video chip you where talking about.
Below, it writes (without a hdd sata and ddr2 memory) :
HP Compaq dc7600 Small Form Factor, pentium 4, 2800 Mhz, video onboard, pci express low profile
https://www.pluspc.ro/produs/kit-hp-dc7 ... asa-sursa/

The ZIF floppy cable has 20 pins. I found this, but i don't where to begin if a buy a floppy drive cable from a laptop :
http://www.hardwarebook.info/Apple_Maci ... disk_drive
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Re: Internal floppy drive laptop to Mac compatibility ?

Post by 24bit »

A HP DC7600 will make a nice "helper" Mac, methinks.
You will best run a 32bit Windows on it, XP is a good solution, HP should still have the drivers.
After adding HDD and some RAM you may run Basilik II Build 142 with XP as host OS.
Please note that only this Build 142 will allow you to read/write Mac HFS 1.44MB floppies.

The DC7600 indeed has a GMA 950 GPU which is supported by OSX 10.6 (32bit)
Much will depend on your CPU. I seem to recall that some P4 did work - alas not all of them.

For your dead PB floppy, PC parts won´t be of much help.
Apple had custom connectors, cables and floppy drives, MacOS will not work with standard PC parts in general.

Your Toshiba HDD will need to be formatted as Mac HFS Standard drive (not HFS+ aka HFS Extended).
FAT32 partitions, regardless of their size are useless.
Third party (costly) apps may enable HFS formatting from Windows, but I never tried that myself.
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