
The best way to preserve Macintosh software from floppy disks - ingve
http://vintageapplemac.com/155-the-best-way-to-preserve-macintosh-software-from-floppy-disks
======
simmons
For what it's worth, I was recently able to recover some Apple IIe/Mac 800K
floppies for a relative using a KryoFlux board [1] and a regular PC floppy
drive. I was glad to have that option, since I sure don't have any vintage
Apple 800K drives lying around!

[1] [https://www.kryoflux.com/](https://www.kryoflux.com/)

~~~
cortesoft
Kryoflux is amazing. I have found the best way to get good images is to get a
few different old floppy drives (you can find them pretty cheap on amazon or
ebay) and take images with a few of them. You will find that each drive has
different bad sectors in the images. You can then patch together good sectors
from the different drives to create a full, complete image.

I was able to get a lot of disk images from disks that were failing to read
fully on ANY of the drives, but were failing in different sectors.

~~~
mveety
Same here. After my Amiga died I wanted to move to emulation, but I found a
lot of my disks had died (I had moved to WHDload years before this so they
haven't been used in a long time) and I was heart broken. A friend told me
about Kryoflux and it worked flawlessly for them. It's only very rarely that I
haven't been able to read a disk with it and most of them were super cheap
2000's era shitty disks. It's a utterly lifesaving and magical device.

------
zeveb
I'm wondering what the best way to preserve old Mac _installations_ is. I have
some old Macintosh computers (one 68K & one PowerPC), and I'd like to get rid
of them, but only after I've backed them up and ensured that I can run them on
a modern Linux system.

SheepShaver is … a bit of a chore to get working (compared to VirtualBox).

A quick Googling doesn't reveal any obvious walkthroughs …

~~~
rjsw
Why get rid of them ?

~~~
zeveb
Because they're taking up space in my small home, and someday I may want to
move. And eventually I'm sure the electronics will fail. Don't capacitors dry
out eventually?

~~~
gerdesj
If the capacitors come from the right time then they may bulge and have failed
already.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague)
. Replacing capacitors is generally quite easy and they are cheap.

There are lots more things that can go wrong with old electronics and if the
chips have lost their logic or whatever, you may find replacing those a bit
more of a challenge or even to diagnose.

That said, I simply put a new battery into a radio made around 1974 (Roberts)
and it worked. I'd already read up on things like tin whiskers growing inside
the transistors and all sorts of horrors but I didn't need to dust down my
soldering iron.

There are a lot of electronics hobby sites around with some very knowledgeable
people lurking in them.

~~~
cr0sh
Tin whiskers were really only a thing with lead-free solder that was mandated
in a stupid fashion by the EU (I won't go into specifics, but it really didn't
make any sense once you started to look into why it was done, and the
exemptions, etc).

That solder used more tin in the alloy than lead-based solders did, and grew
"whiskers" like crazy. Various methods and means were attempted to slow it
down (the best way was complete conformal coating - but that made rework very
difficult), but it took a while for manufacturers to understand what and how
it was happening. I think since then, lead-free solder has a different
formulation to make it not as bad, but it still happens. Technically, it can
happen in virtually any tin-based alloy, but for some reason lead-based alloys
with tin didn't grow them anywhere near as much or as fast.

So - a 1974 radio is probably not going to be an issue. The computers, though,
are a different thing. It will depend on when they were manufactured vs when
the EU directive came around, and when the manufacturer switched over, etc. A
lot of small variables come into play.

Likely, though, there won't be any problems. I still have computers and
electronics from the early 1990s and before that all work fine. The issues
with capacitors should be looked at, but it was only a problem for a certain
time period (late 1990s IIRC); prior to that you'd only have to worry about
"reforming" capacitors if they were very, very old (like power supply caps
from a computer of the early 1970s or such). If you had - say - an Altair from
the 1970s - yeah, you wouldn't want to try just plugging it in, that could
lead to a fire even if the caps looked ok.

~~~
SyneRyder
Is there any strategy I should use for turning on old electronics that haven't
been turned on in a while (or links I should be looking at?) I still have a
Commodore 64, Apple IIGS & a Mac LC630, but I haven't turned them on in a few
years. For instance, maybe I should plug the devices into an APC UPS, so at
least I know it's getting clean power?

I'd be sad enough if starting them up caused them to stop working, but I
hadn't considered the possibility of them catching fire....

~~~
mrpippy
I would blow any dust out, and do a basic visual inspection of the logic board
before you power it on. Macs of a certain age (like that LC630) have PRAM
batteries which may have leaked/exploded, and capacitors which also may have
leaked.

------
xenophonf
I have a small stockpile of 5.25-inch floppies from the early '80s. They're
mostly TurboDOS diskettes, which was a multi-user CP/M clone. I have no clue
how they might be formatted or even whether they're readable, but I'd love to
recover them for admittedly sentimental reasons. Can anyone suggest a starting
point?

~~~
bluGill
How important is this? I'm guess these are just "it would be neat to see what
is there", so that is what I will comment. If you have something that is
important look for a professional service - disks this old often have problems
and can be only read once. There is a lot of old live music on CD because
someone put the cassette tape in an oven and then read it at ultra slow
speeds: they got one try as the act of reading the tape destroyed it. Thus for
anything important you want someone who knows all the tricks.

My first thought is start with an old pc (probably i486) with a floppy drive
and a working harddrive, and a network card. Install linux (old kernel - don't
give this access to the real internet). From there use networking (nfs or ftp)
to copy the parts to a more modern system.

Goodwill and surplus stores might still have all the parts if you look around.
Also hacker spaces, ask around what someone still has in the dark corners of
their basement.

------
nategri
I'm not sure how close to unobtainium they currently are, but I second the
SuperDrive as a viable alternative to something like a Kryoflux. Given you
have a 68k or other compatible Mac lying around as well, of course.

Ciderpress (windows utility) + SuperDrive-equipped Classic Mac was all I
needed for all my early-1980s and Macintosh and Apple ][ related hobby
adventures.

EDIT: Well I guess if you're stepping all the way down to 140KB ProDOS disks
you'll need access to an Apple ][ system that can bridge the gap. Apple ][GS's
are great for this.

------
re
Site appears to be down at the moment; it's in the Internet Archive though:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20171204210040/vintageapplemac.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20171204210040/vintageapplemac.com/155-the-
best-way-to-preserve-macintosh-software-from-floppy-disks)

