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Using a PC Floppy Disc or CD on a Mac.

Since 1989, the Mac's 3.5 floppy drive has had the ability to read, write, and initialise 1.44MB PC floppies, known as DOS-formatted floppy discs. The Mac floppy drive is known as the SuperDrive or FDHD (which is short for floppy-drive, high density). The only Mac models that do not have a SuperDrive were the original Mac 128k, the Mac 512k, the Mac Plus, and the older Mac SE's (the SuperDrive was added in the middle of the SE's production run).

Mounting PC Disks in the Finder.

Though the Mac's floppy drive can read and write to PC floppies, it's the PC Exchange control panel that automatically mounts the disk on the Desktop, letting you drag and drop Mac and PC files between Mac and PC drives and disks. All you need to do is make sure the "On" button is selected in the PC Exchange control panel. (In the years before PC Exchange, you needed the now-defunct Apple File Exchange utility to access PC floppies.

When you insert a PC disk, it appears on the Finder desktop with this icon:

view of PC disc in Mac


The files on a mounted Windows disk will each be represented by a generic PC icon.

Mac screen view

It is possible that your version of PC Exchange will not support Windows 95/98 long file names. It will display long file names in an 8.3 format, cutting off the remaining characters but as the file names from your original PCW disc(s) will be no longer than 8.3 there is no problem.

Reading PC CD-ROM Discs on Macs.

The Mac OS has the ability to mount DOS and Windows CD-ROM's on the Finder's Desktop. This is made possible by the Foreign File Access and ISSO 9660 File Access extension files in the System folder. Turning these extensions off in the Extensions Manager control panel disables the Mac's ability to read PC CD-ROM's.

Reading Windows CD-ROM doesn't necessarily mean you can open the files on the disc, play PC games, or use Windows software. The ability to use mount Windows CD-ROM's is useful only if your Mac applications can read the particular Windows files in question or you can convert the files to Mac format with MacLinkPlus, QuickTime, or other translation software.

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