Read errors on DVD. I polished some of them out with car paint scratch remover One folder containing plans for which our Men's Shed has no use is the worst affected. So I'm almost done dragging & dropping the other folders to my iMac's desktop - 600 MB of 2 GB remaining to copy. The DVD drive is making the kind of noises normally associated with a floppy disk drive.
I was presented with a DVD containing plans for woodworking toys & projects, plus instructions to copy the same. No DVD apps, either copying or playing would recognise this DVD as such.
Only the Finder would show the DVD on the desktop. Drag & dropping of various folders was painfully slow, then stopped after only 130.8 MB of 2.69 GB had copied. This was after ten minutes.
Disk Utility on two High Sierra Macs wouldn't register it as a DVD.
However, DU on a Leopard PPC PowerBook does recognise it as a DVD in an optical drive, but even then, won't allow copying, it falls over after about 5 minutes.
It's all fucking bullshit.
12 litres of water added to the evaporative cooler, now it’s full. Temperature tonight isn’t expected to drop below 19°C and the humidity is fairly high. It’s cheaper re electricity costs to run the evap cooler than A/C.
While the USB floppy drive will wok on High Sierra, it's not happy reformatting drives, that's best done on the "Wee Beastie" (my 12-in 2005 G4 PowerBook). That Mac has AppleWorks 6.2.9 on it, just for a fiddle, I copied & pasted an rtf doc into AppleWorks & saved it to the floppy drive as a .cwk document.
I then connected the FD to the MacBook Air and tried opening the file with LibreOffice Vanilla. It worked perfectly.
TIL my USB 1.1 floppy disc drive works OK on High Sierra. I may have a job getting data off an old (1995) Mac that has a 1.44 MB FD & 2 x CD-ROM drive plus an IDE HDD.
Very likely the old machine won't boot, usually because the (horribly expensive) 4.5 v battery is flat. Some of the Macs in my collection have an adapted battery, it's the original battery's circuit board connector soldered onto a 2 x AAA & a 1 x AAA battery holder so 3 x AAA cells can provide the required power.
@matigo It works! Not brilliantly when it comes to reformatting floppies but read & write are OK.
@matigo Perhaps not. Everymac.com reveals that the HD uses an IDE connection. Somewhere I have an IDE external drive. Now I need to check whether my USB floppy drive still works under High Sierra: it did under Sierra.
Seems like I have dozens of odd socks that just won’t make pairs. So I’m chucking them out. I bought another 10 pairs of socks today that are totally different to any existing ones.
I have also put him onto a friend of mine who lives not far away & has lots of old computer gear. He should be able to extract the data from the 580’s HD.