khioe@mona.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Kent Hioe) (04/09/91)
Hi, does any body know if there is a way to read a macintosh diskette from a PC ? Thanks Kent khioe@mona.jpl.nasa.gov elroy!mona.jpl.nasa.gov!khioe
knotts@hpl-opus.hpl.hp.com (Tom Knotts) (04/11/91)
Hi, does any body know if there is a way to read a macintosh diskette from a PC ? One method is to buy the Deluxe Option Board. This half-height board is inserted between the Floppy controller and a 3.5" 1.44-Meg floppy drive. When normal DOS commands are issued, such as cp and dir, the board is transparent. But when DOS commands are preceeded with `m', mcp, mdir, etc., the board intercepts and turns the drive into an 800K MAC drive. Then MAC disks can be read, formatted, copied to and from. A PC drive turns at a constant speed; a MAC drive turns at different speeds depending on where the head is; when closer to the center, the drive turns more slowly so that one turn on the MAC disk has the same amount of data. The Options board cannot change the PC disk speed; this is fixed. So it changes the rate at which data is written and read from the disk, thereby having the same effect. One warning; the board is only guaranteed to work for certain drives such as the TEAK. The PC drive must be 1.44Meg, and the MAC disk density can only be 400K or 800K. It costs about $115 mail order. It's one of the best $115 I've ever spent. As an added plus, the product also allows to copy disks that have been copy protected, and do direct bit scanning and editing of (PC) disks. tom