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My mother has those 3 Monotype floppy disks for Mac with fonts on them that she would like to recover. However, the only Mac we still have that has a floppy drive is a Macintosh SE, and while it works pretty well for a 22-years-old computer, there's no way for us to transfer anything from it to newer, shinier Intel Macs.

We could, however, verify that the 18-years-old floppies are still in working condition.

I have access to PCs with floppy drives. However, the floppies are in Mac format, so Windows won't read them.

What can I do? If I can get the files on them, that would be perfect. However, anything as low as a disk image of the floppies would be enough to get me going.

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It doesnt matter if Windows can read the filesystem or not, it just needs to be able to read the disk. Get a disk imaging program such as WinImage to make an image of the floppy and transfer it to the Mac.

Edit: You can buy USB floppy drives, you can find them on the web for about $10-15. I realized this, from digging through a box to find a cable and saw I had one.

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Yes, I know that it doesn't matter. Though, I've tried dd if=/dev/fd0 of=~/disk.img with a 3-years-old Mandriva LiveCD and all I got was an I/O error. I'll try again with Windows and WinImage; I didn't know any software that made images out of floppies. Thank you. – zneak Aug 27 '11 at 18:10
I have a couple CDs with images of every floppy I ever owned, or found useful. I wasnt that long ago that you still had to break out a DOS bootable floppy to work on an old machine. Now that I think about it, I wonder where those CDs are... – Keltari Aug 27 '11 at 19:23
A couple of CDs? You must not have had many floppies? :-) Granted, floppies were small and CDs are large in comparison, but I definitely cannot copy every floppy I’ve got in that box under my bed to just a couple of CDs. – Synetech Aug 27 '11 at 19:35
You can fit 450 floppies on one CD, not including compression. How many floppies do you have?! – Keltari Aug 27 '11 at 19:40
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Have you tried dd_rescue from a regular floppy drive? It will not stop on I/O errors.

See a complete solution to your question on Repair floppy disc linux

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