format PC floppy to use on Amiga?

[Piru]

I think there is a lot of confusion in this thread, and not alone from sim085.

First of all, there are no "PC" or "amiga" floppies. The disks are exactly the same physically. There are however double density (up to 1MB unformatted size) and high density (up to 2MB unformatted size) floppies (some higher density ones do exist as well, but are rather rare). It's perfectly possible to use the higher density floppies in place of the lower density ones.

The PC floppy controller is much more rigid and doesn't allow as flexible track layout as amiga (technical: Amiga can write full tracks with whatever track layout desired, PC controller cannot). Thus you can use amiga to format disks to PC format (720KB or 1.44MB if you have a HD drive), but not the other way around. Unless if you go for specialized hardware you cannot write or format floppies to amiga format on a PC.

If you wish to format any floppies for amiga use, just format them on amiga. That's it.


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Transferring files between amiga and PC is another topic, and there using PC formatted 720KB floppies with CrossDOS is one option, albeit not necessarily the best one.

[Piru]

But will I be able to boot from such floppy disks?

After you use the c:install command to install the bootblock, yes.

To reiterate: the disks are physically exactly the same, it does not matter where they originate from.

There are no "PC" floppies or "Amiga" floppies. They're exactly the same.

What matters is how you format them. If you format them to amiga disk format they're perfectly normal amiga disks. You can boot from them just fine.

or I will need a tool like CrossDos to read such floppy disks?

No

[Piru]

The high density disks have more tracks

No they don't. They have exactly the same 80 tracks.

[Piru]

Thirdly, use Double Density disks, not High Density.

This is a fair point, even though the disks are similar and you might get lucky, it much depends on the specific media and the health of the drive. For instance when things start to get out of calibration the first thing to fail are the "borderline" media.

HD disks require a stronger magnetic field than DD disks, so your old A500 drive probably can't magnetise the surface enough.

Actually it's the other way around: DD recording strength is higher than HD.

There are ton of information regarding why it may or may not fail. Here's some good discussion with some great information:

http://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/guzis.html

In short: If only possible use genuine DD media. Or if not possible make sure to properly erase the floppies before use.