See addendum for some comments about preferred hardware and software.įor Lisa disks (or 400K disks for use with MacWorks), you can use any 3.5' SS/DD floppies - that is single sided, double density. A PowerMac G3 has been tested using Disk Copy 4.2 and it also works.) Those Mac clones that do not support 800K floppies will not work. will all work, as will some early 68K and early PPC PowerBooks with floppy drives. Mac IIcx, IIci, IIsi, Plus, SE, SE/30, PPC7100, etc.

Most older Macs will work, as will most early PowerPC's.

Instead, obtain both the DART and Disk Copy 4.2 programs, since you may find disk images in either flavor when trying to locate software for your Lisa.īetween the two, when making your own disk images, you should use Disk Copy 4.2 as it's more compatible and friendly with your Mac and Lisa despite the fact that DART supports compression.Īn old Macintosh that has a floppy drive capable of using 400K or 800K floppies. It will appear to work, but it will strip off the vital tag data, which will prevent the disks from booting on a Lisa! Some of the later versions of Disk Copy claim to be able to convert DART disk images into Disk Copy images. (Ideally you'll have both.) Apple's Disk Copy 4.2 program (later versions will not be useful) or Apple's DART program (version 1.5.4 was the last released).ĭo not use later versions of Disk Copy, nor anything that comes with Mac OS X! These do not support the extra 12 bytes of tag data which is vital for use with your Lisa. The 400K single sided drives the Lisa uses have a foam pad on the top where the drive head is, this may wear away the magnetic media on the top surface of the floppies, making them unreliable as double sided floppies. Just because your Mac doesn't recognize the data on a floppy doesn't mean that there isn't any data there! It could be a Xenix, or Lisa Office System formatted disk! Make sure you know where it came from.Īlso, you should not reuse Lisa disks as Mac disks.

Formatting will wipe any data on the disk. If you insert a Lisa disk into your Mac, it will not recognize it as having a valid file system and it will offer to format it for you. How do I make floppy disks for use with my Lisa?

Mac formatted floppy disk image