>> I have an old Power Mac G4 Digital Audio, and I would like to add on a >> floppy drive to read floppy disks I may find floating around. So I >> purchased a floppy drive on eBay, but I realized that it has a normal >> floppy drive connector. Is there any way I could connect this drive to >> my >> G4 without buying a new drive or making this external? > > No. There is no connector on the board for a "normal" floppy. I've seen > some folks shoehorn it into a USB enclosure in one of the 5.25" bays and > connect that up, however.
Even PCs have no floppy drive connector. Exception ... Those early PC motherboards which were designed using a "Super I/O" chip, made by ITE and many other Asian companies. This chip rides on the PC's "low pin count" bus, which Intel-based Macs also have, and converts that to: 1) standard 34-pin floppy drive, and 2) standard 40-pin ATA bus which supports two ATA drives, and 3) RS-232/RS-422 serial port, and 4) "Centronics-type" parallel port, but using IBM's "Centronics-type" pinout. These "Super I/O" chips largely disappeared with the 5-Series motherboards from Intel and many others, but were considered essential for 4-Series motherboards, and earlier ones as well. The BEST solution for accessing floppies on a Mac is a Fujitsu or equal USB floppy drive. Incredibly enough, these even work on PCs, and can be bootable if the PC motherboard/BIOS supports booting from a USB device. On a "Hackintosh", floppy booting is even possible by selecting "USB-Floppy" from the boot device selection menu. Alas, a standard floppy only accommodates 1.44 megabytes of info, and most PC BIOSes these days are 8 megabytes, a little more or a little less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_I/O -- -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "G-Group" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to g3-5-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.