A Tale of Wizards and Song (alpha):

  Welcome to the home on the web for the SWIM 3 Floppy Driver for Mac OS X and Darwin. This driver was announced on April 1, 2002.

This driver is for Apple-branded floppy hardware as used in the PowerBook G3 Series (Wallstreet and Mainstreet/PDQ), the Power Macintosh G3 (beige), and others. This driver is -not- for third-party floppy drives of any kind. Third party drives are either USB devices or ATA devices, while Apple floppy drives are raw Sony, Mitsubishi, or Panasonic drive mechanisms attached directly to the motherboard controller. Thid driver will not help you in any way with third-party devices, so don't even try.

Please read the DISCLAIMER before using this driver.

Current Version

The current version of this driver (0.96) was released on June 22, 2002. For more information, see our version history.

Machines believed to work:

  • Beige G3 Desktop
  • Beige G3 Minitower
  • G3 All-in-One
  • PowerBook G3 Series (Wallstreet and Mainstreet)
  • PowerMac 8500

All other PCI PowerMacs with SWIM3 floppy hardware should work except PowerBook 2400 and 3400, but other machines are untested.

Known Bugs:

  • Really, really ugly code. Really.
  • POTENTIAL DATA CORRUPTION BUG (fixed in 0.95). *
  • Powerbook floppy drive must be inserted into bay before booting. **
  • Powerbook 2400 and 3400 are not supported. ***

More Bugs (Bug Tracking Database)

Submitting new Bugs:

Before reporting a bug, please boot into Mac OS 9 and verify that the problem is not caused by a dead floppy drive or a bad disk.

To submit new bugs, please follow the directions on submitting a bug report.

Thanks,
The MkLinux Floppy Team