It is highly possible that the drive is dirty or damaged (out of alignment).
I've had a few drives work only with media that they format. Occasionally,
that drive might read other media, but your situation is a classic symptom
of this problem. I have not heard of any method that will fix. I've always
replaced the drive.
Matthew

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Cyrus <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Does it work the other way? I have a Mac Plus, and it seems to be able
> to format a 1.44Mb disk sot that it can read it, but then none of my
> other macs (IIsi, G3 minitower) will read it, and if I format the
> disks on the newer macs, the Plus won't read them.
>
>     -Cyrus
>
> On Feb 10, 5:06 pm, Derek Morton <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Dylan,
> >
> > I am not sure where you got it that a superdrive is incapable of reading
> 800K disks, but it will.  It will also read 400K disks...  Support for MFS
> was dropped at some point, although I cannot recall what OS version (8?).
>  As long as the disks are HFS (which they should be), you should be good to
> go.
> >
> > Keep in mind that when the original "superdrive" floppy drives came out
> the Mac had only been around a few years and there were still plenty of
> people with 400K and 800K disks in use...  Not to mention the extra cost of
> HD disks back then (the hole punch was my friend).
> >
> > Derek
> >
> > >     I need a 800k 3.5" external disk drive for my
> > > PowerMac 7100. The
> > > only connection on these machines that seems viable for
> > > such a device
> > > is the SCSI port, but that dosn't really make sense for
> > > such a slow
> > > device. I definitely don't think one could use the
> > > serial / printer
> > > port. I have never seen an external disk drive for a
> > > PowerMac. My
> > > Apple IIe & GS have a special port just for external
> > > floppy drives,
> > > does anyone know if their is an adapter that makes these
> > > compatible
> > > with a Macintosh? This would be great, because I have
> > > several of these
> > > drives already.
> >
> > > The reason I need this is because the 2MB internal drive
> > > won't read
> > > 800k disks, no Mac "superdrive" will. I never
> > > understood this
> > > limitation with Mac machines, as I come from a PC
> > > background. This has
> > > never been true of PC disk drives. I understand why it
> > > won't work,
> > > because of head alignment, I just don't understand why
> > > this is not the
> > > case in PC drives. Anyone know a way around this? I
> > > don't think there
> > > is one.
> >
> > > Does anyone have a 800k 3.5" drive that will work with
> > > a PowerMac 7100
> > > which they wouldn't mind selling for a reasonable
> > > price?
> >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Dylan
> >
>

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