I have two 800K 3.5" drives and one 5.25" drive for my Apple IIGS. However, I can't seem to use any 800K 3.5" disks. It's like it can't find it, or it doesn't work, and I've tried both 3.5" drives. I even tried just having one 3.5" drive connected, and no other drives, and it still wouldn't see or load anything from any of the disks.
Both 3.5" drives eject floppies perfectly, so that's good. I downloaded several different GS/OS images from macintoshgarden.org and some of them would write to a disk, and some caused Stuffit Expander to exit with an error of type 3. I used a Power Macintosh 7200/75 to download the images and write them to the disks. I tried on both Mac OS 7.6.1 and Mac OS 8.6.
Am I doing something wrong? I have limited knowledge of Apple II computers, so I'm looking through the DOS manual, the IIGS owner's manual, and nothing I find, including online works for me.
This Apple IIGS is the 1 MB of RAM version, with ROM version 3.
If anyone could help me, I'd appreciate it! Thanks in advance!
I don't have a IIGS neither a 3.5" driver, but most likely they behave the same way the 5.25" drivers in a IIe. Try to clean the drivers' heads with isopropyl alcohol and make sure you are using DD floppies and not the HD
DON'T attempt to clean the 3.5" drive's heads, especially if you've never done that before! They are very fragile and precisely aligned compared to the 5.25" head. Try to format an 800K diskette with adtpro or Copy II Plus.
I had already cleaned the heads, and then that drive was able to read and write disks, but yes I'm very careful with them. One of the spare floppy drives for my Power Macintosh 7200/75 had actually physically broken the top head off.
The full test must be if the "cleaned" drive is capable of reading diskettes written on other, properly aligned drives, especially on side 2.
Your 3.5” drives should connect to the IIgs before the 5.25” drives.
In the control panel slot 5 must be set to “Smart Port”
Thanks, it was properly set to that :)
It seems to be able to :) Also, I didn't have that program until not long before you mentioned it. Also, it was impossible for it to read disks in the state it was in, so I wouldn't have been able to try CopyIIPlus or adtpro. My existing software library for all Apple II stuff was small when I came into possession of them, and I haven't spent much time on any of my Apple II computers, despite having them for over 15 years lol.
Hopefully, now that it reads (or seems to) disks, I can download software on my Power Macintosh 7200/75 and save it to the 800K disks. I plan to get more memory for it and also a SCSI hard drive so that I can run GS/OS on it.
There are modern alternatives to SCSI drivers. You might consider CF3000 from RM
https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/cffa-v1-0-rev-c-rm-for-ii-ii-iie-and-iigs/
Floppy EMU from BMOW
https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/
Among other mass storage devices
These are not so modern and pretty slow comared to real SCSI standard drives and controllers.