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Offline Will-i-amTopic starter

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formatted floppies question
« on: October 24, 2005, 05:59:15 PM »
Something I meant to ask awhile back... the scarcity of DD floppies for my tower led me to Staples where I bought a box of floppies on sale only to find that they were pre-formatted for PCs. Then I found that I could not unformat them, reformat them or otherwise make them Amiga formatted because Crossdos jumps in and treats them as PC floppies. Sooo since these bags of old Amiga disks are so beat up and unusable for the most part, what's a good way to get pre-formatted PC floppies to regroup as Amiga formatted floppies?
 

Offline Will-i-amTopic starter

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Re: formatted floppies question
« Reply #1 on: October 24, 2005, 10:36:59 PM »
ummm things are a bit more complicated than I had originally thought. Now I find that the A4KD no longer recognizes ANY PC formatted disk. I've compared the system to the A2KD which does 'see' it and it looks like it's okay, except I'm comparing 3.1 OS to  to 2.1 OS so I'm not sure about the various applicable files, but the same files sem to be in the same places. What am I forgetting about Crossdos? Curiously this POS Sony which gets me out into the web ALSO doesn't want to fomat a new DD floppy!! Says something is using drive A: when drive A: is obviously empty. Crap oh dear. Time to drop back ten and punt. I am begining to think using Winuae and just playing games might be more fun than trying to keep a collection of previously owned miggies running the way they should. Except I can't seem to let go of those off-white boxes. Maybe it's the genlocks, maybe it's the Toasters, but when they work I love 'em. Just wish they would reformat a PC disk when I ask them to. I'll get back to this later. Thanks for the various advices, didn't help much but the thought was there.
 

Offline Will-i-amTopic starter

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Re: formatted floppies question
« Reply #2 on: October 25, 2005, 01:42:09 PM »
Hmmmm. I may have to think of a new nickname for this machine, something not-so-nice. Been arguing with it now for several hours, trying to find a good, undamaged PC formatted disk. Both HD and DD floppies show up on workbench as df0:??? and no icon PC0: at all. If I look at the DD floppy with Dopus it says "directory not available". From a shell I get nothin', zero, nada. System:devs/dosdrivers shows PC0: is in there. In system:L we find the crossdosfilesystem. What else am I missing? This is one of those machines I bought from a friend who got it at auction at Philips. They did some odd things to both machines, but I must have been able to read PC floppies at some point in the past because I had to move files over to the PC from the Amiga by sneakernet to get the Ami2PC program up and running. Corrupt file maybe? How do I find out? The A4K is running os 3.1. I'm going to go slowly mad if these machines don't start acting more like the Amiga I fell in love with... that cute little juggling robot, that saucy squirrel, Rocket Ranger launching toward a destiny unknown... sigh. One of the problems I'm having is the side effects of my pain meds: loss of short term memory. If I remember to write things down I forget where I put the paper! Take it from me, try not to crush your vertebrae: ten years later it just gets worse. Not whining, really just tired and frustrated. Okay, push the 'submit' button and move on...
 

Offline Will-i-amTopic starter

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Re: formatted floppies question
« Reply #3 on: October 26, 2005, 12:25:47 PM »
Thomas, sorry I seem a bit confused. I wanted two things from this situation: consistancy- both machines have crossdos, as far as I can tell and only one can read pc disks. I would like to figure out how to make both of them do the same thing. I am limited by the fact that I haven't got a cross dos install in this pile of floppies scattered around the room, so set up is hard. Both machines appear to be set up the same, except for the os. Secondly- the thing that started this thread(for me anyway) was that I had tried in the past to format a disk on my amiga which turned out to be a pc formatted disk. My machine (tried) to format it as a pc disk using crossdos(apparently).When I bought a box of floppies at Staples they turned out to be all preformatted as pc disks and there was apparently no place to buy the old fashioned non-formatted DD disks. I know how to use the various ways to format an amiga disk (shell, menus etc) but each time I tried the machine would try to format it as a pc disk, and that format job didn't work out well because when it was done no machine could read the disk, including this Sony Vaio I am using as we speak. None of my machines (Amiga) can get to the internet in spite of a couple of years of trying, bringing in various hackers and geeks and dweebs and other euphamisms for knowlegeable people, including asking questions here... so the floppy is an important means of getting files from the web into my colection of amigas. Most of my amiga floppies have been used at least once, are ancient by floppy standards and several have back blocks etc. So I wanted to have a consistant supply of floppies that I could use as amiga formatted disks. Once I am able to create a networked group of machines this won't be such an issue, but for now sneakernet is my only way to move files around between the 5 amigas I own. Is that clear enough to figure out my problem? It's a stew of issues.... hope this clears things up, and hope someone can give me a solution. Thanks for your time!!