Can i use pc formatted(fat16/fat32) hard drive on amiga

[hostrudy]

I got an Amiga 1200 with 3.1 OS on hard drive. I got lot of amiga stuff on my pc and i try to transfer to my Amiga. The CD doesn't want to work no way i try to set the jumpers, change the drive to another, it just doesn't works. I also try to use idefix, same issue.

So i think to use another hard drive. I format the drive on pc, put my amiga stuff on it and than connect the drive to the amiga. The amiga doesn't see the partition. Do i need some extra tools to work with it or can i find some dos file system for amiga, so i can use the pc drives on amiga?

[amigadave]

You need a program like CrossDOS on the Amiga to read PC formatted floppies and hard drives.  I think the last version was v7.  Another option is to use a null modem serial cable or an ethernet direct network connection between the Amiga and the PC and transfer your files.  I am not understanding why you cannot transfer by CD-ROM though, do you have a working CD drive on the Amiga?  Do you have a CD file system like AsimCDFS installed on the Amiga?  I assume you have a CD writer on the PC.  Make sure it is writing the CD in a format that your Amiga CD file system can read.  Hope this helped, look on the Net for programs and ways to network your Amiga to the PC via serial null modem or ethernet.

[Brian]

Get Fat95 of Aminet.net... that's what you need.

[trgse]

download fat95 from aminet, there is some explenation/dosdrivers there that might help.
and fat95 is more compatible with fat filesystem's than crossDOS ever was, you also have msd95 which is very good for simply connecting a hd, it's read-only but is far simpler to use, for instance
type this into a shell
1> msd95 -d -l -nscsi.device -u0
this will attempt to mount any hd formatted with FAT on the scsi.device using scsi commands with unit 0
if it succeds you will get a drive icon with the partion/hd name just as a normal amiga HDD, to quit you simply press CTRL-C in the shell, then it will remove the HDD etc.
msd95 seem's to be slightly more compatible with diffrent FAT's than even fat95 is.

then you have the utility giggledisk to try, it will attempt to mount any FAT, EXT2, EXT3 and NTFS (probably also FFS :-) ) that it can find on a specified HDD/partion etc (haven't used it much so...)

[InTheSand]

The alternative is to place the Amiga's hard drive in a PC with WinUAE on it... Then you'll be able to access the Amiga's drive's partitions directly from the emulated Amiga environment running on the PC and copy stuff to/from your PC's hard disk.

Search the forums and/or Google, there's plenty of discussion about this.

I did the same thing fairly recently when I wanted to get a load of stuff on to my A3000 without having to resort to serial cables or floppy disks...

 - Ali

[nasty]

Yip I agree with InTheSand, The first thing I ever bought to transfer data from my PC to my Amiga was the Ami-PC linkup. which was fine for smaller files but not so good on larger files. Then I bought Burnit for the amiga, so I could simply burn my amiga stuff to CD (but couldnt find a suitable cd burner!) if needed but the way which to send data faster and does'nt cost you anything is to put you amiga HDD in your PC and then transfer data from each other all day long.