MacBook Air M1 doesn't detect USB Floppy drive

[gferluga]

My MacBook Air M1 (Apple pro lessor) doesn't detect an external USB Floppy disk drive.

The sysinfo (hardware level) shows the drive:

USB Floppy Drive: Location ID:0x00120000
Connection Type:Removable
Manufacturer:Y-E DATA
Serial Number:Not Provided
Link Speed:12 Mb/s
USB Vendor ID:0x057b
USB Product ID:0x0000
USB Product Version:0x0703
Power Allocated:2.5 W (500 mA)

But at software level not.

diskutil list

Doesn't show the drive.

Could be related to macOS Tahoe 26.2?

Thanks in advance.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Is there a disk in it? If there is no mounted volume from that drive, it may not appear in diskutil.

 

[Reaperducer]

I'm pretty sure I read that macOS dropped support for USB floppy drives several years ago.

Everything that comes up in a web search claiming it's possible is from 3 to 10 years ago.

 

[gferluga]

Yes. There is a floppy inside. I'm curious if Greaseweazle or FluxEngine or KryoFlux would make the job...

 

[dkalley]

The current OS is not going to support any floppy compatible file systems. What kind of file system are you trying to access: HFS, MFS, FAT12/16? If the former, perhaps try installing hfsutils (is it Tahoe compatible?) MFS won't work with a USB floppy. I don't think FAT works either, I used an older pre-USB machine for it in the past. So, you are right; the drive exists and can be seen from the OS, it just cannot read from it.

 

[Reaperducer]

The OS still understands FAT. It can read FAT-formatted memory cards just fine.

 

[jafir]

I just tried this on my Mac mini M4. It sees a FAT formatted floppy disk just fine.

 

[Reaperducer]

I just tried this on my Mac mini M4. It sees a FAT formatted floppy disk just fine.

...and now I'm off to eBay.

 

[jafir]

...and now I'm off to eBay.

In case it's helpful, here are the drive details of the drive I tested with:

TEAC FD-05PUB:
Location ID: 0x02110000
Connection Type: Removable
Manufacturer: TEAC
Serial Number: Not Provided
Link Speed: 12 Mb/s
USB Vendor ID: 0x0644
USB Product ID: 0x0000
USB Product Version: 0x0000
Power Allocated: 2.5 W (500 mA)

 

[jafir]

I just tried another drive too, with the following details:

FlashBuster-U:
Location ID: 0x02110000
Connection Type: Removable
Manufacturer: Y-E DATA
Serial Number: Not Provided
Link Speed: 12 Mb/s
USB Vendor ID: 0x057b
USB Product ID: 0x0000
USB Product Version: 0x0312
Power Allocated: 2.5 W (500 mA)

It was a little strange, and at first I thought it didn't work, but I ejected the disk and tried another and it worked fine, and then I went back to the original disk and it worked fine too, so maybe the mech was just stuck.

Also this drive, using both of the exact same floppies, shows a floppy icon in MacOS 26.2, and the other drive just seemed to show a generic grey icon for an external drive.

This drive was one of those marketed towards the original iMacs where you could replace a plastic panel in the drive with one the same color as your iMac.

 

[dkalley]

I just tried this on my Mac mini M4. It sees a FAT formatted floppy disk just fine.

Strange, I tried two functional USB drives on an iMac with no luck so I ended up digging out an old 68k laptop which read them with no issues. Obviously the FAT filesystem is supported with USB HDDs and UFDs, I just had no luck myself via a USB FDDs. It may have been the old version of OSX I was using, I didn't try on a new OS.