Format 720kb IBM floppies to 880kb Amiga format?

[Ral-Clan]

No, they are no different.  Just make sure you are using true 720K (DD) disks and not High Density disks.

[Ral-Clan]

Don't try to reformat your Workbench floppies unless you want to erase them entirely (that's part of what formatting does).

It very well could be they are just old floppies suffering from bit-rot.  I.e. the magnetic data on them degrades over time.  After 20 years, many good floppies are now unreadable.

You definitely should try formatting a spare floppy in that drive, though, to see if it works.  You can't damage a floppy by trying to format it in a faulty drive (unless the drive head somehow crashes into the plastic surface of the media).  At worst, you won't be able to format the disc, or you'll have a disc that is only readable with that particular drive (if the heads have gone out of alignment).

If your drive is out of alignment, then it will format discs only it will be able to read.  But you can always re-format them when you get a repaired/new drive.  Formatting is not permanent.

But how are you going to get into the OS in order to format the disks if you can't even boot Workbench?

[Ral-Clan]

Before you go hacking apart your A1200, wouldn't it be prudent to get a good known working disk and check if it has problems in your A1200?

That would be a lot less work and eliminate the chance of accidentally damaging your A1200.

You never said where you got those Workbench disks that are failing.  Where did you get this A1200?  Is it one of Petro's?  Were the Workbench disks known to be working before you tried them?

As I said, 15 year old Workbench disks, even if never used, are not likely to be working after all this time.

[Ral-Clan]

I don't think 5 seconds is unusual for it to fail, especially if the boot block is damaged.

No, floppies are not durable media.  Magnetic media is not the greatest for long term storage of digital data.  Especially floppies.

Maybe some types of streaming tape drives are good for long term archival storage (like DDS tapes), but not 3.5" floppies.

It *could* be your drive has failed, but I would try the weakest link first - and that would be the floppy disks themselves.

Didn't the Magic Pack you received come with *any* other bootable disks you could try?

[Ral-Clan]

Yes. There were some other disks in there as well, but I really don't want to risk screwing them up, in case it's the drive that's failing.

A failing drive is not very likely to screw up a floppy disk unless it does some sort of write command to the disk (which is not the case when an Amiga boots).  The only reason it would "screw up" a disk is if the drive head was rubbing against the disk surface - which is not likely to happen.  I would just try it - seriously you don't have much to lose and even if a disk was damaged you can easily find the .adf for that bundled software and re-write them to new disks when you get the system working eventually.

Is there no other way to check whether the floppies are broken or not? Weren't there two or three Windows tools that made it possible to read Amiga floppy disks without the need of a catweasel? EDIT: Found the tool I was thinking about. It's called adfread. I'll still need an Amiga floppy drive for it, of course.

I think you are confused.  This tool requires two regular PC floppy drives, not Amiga drives.  You must have two floppy drives installed in your PC.

You must also have a PC motherboard that supports two floppy drives in the BIOS - many newer motherboards do not support this "legacy" feature.  Do you have an old 486, Pentium I or II hanging around to do this with?

Other than that the ONLY way to read an Amiga disk in a PC is with a CatWeasel or another hardware device like a Kryoflux that reads foreign disk formats on the PC.

The only other ways to boot into Workbench are with a hard drive or CD/DVD drive.  There are PCMIA and SD card solutions for the A1200, but I'm not sure if you can boot from them.  Another option would be to get a Subway or other USB interface for the A1200, but again I'm not sure if it's bootable.

[Ral-Clan]

Good idea.
Gonna pay my former boss another visit after Christmas. I'm sure he can work something out. He's got plenty of floppy drives and quite a few ATA to USB adaptors.

You could try this, but I suspect it won't work.
USB floppies (I suspect) are treated like Mass USB storage devices.  I *suspect* that the USB drive gets mounted on the OS (Windows, etc.) as if it were just a generic USB storage device, and inside the drive there is some sort of hardware translator so that the drive's contents can be read and present to the OS (i.e. windows) is if it came off a USB mass storage device (i.e. a flash drive).  

Because of this I'm guessing the software that runs accomplishes this dual-floppy hardware trick won't work with USB floppy drives.

When computers had internal floppy drives, the BIOS "knew" how to directly control the floppy drive.  I suspect the floppy trick to read Amiga disks on a PC equipped with two PC drives needs these sort of internal BIOS instructions and the on-the-motherboard board floppy controller circuitry.

I'm guessing you will need a real PC that supports floppy drives in the BIOS and has a floppy connector on-board for this trick.

Still, might be worth a try.  Let us know if it works.

Anyways. I've just plopped in another stack of floppies and neither worked. The disk would be read for 3 seconds upon which the aforementioned message would pop up.

When you say you plopped in another stack of floppies - you DO mean a set of Amiga formatted floppies, right?  A set of new, blank, unformatted floppies or PC formatted floppies of course won't be recognized.  Sorry to be pedantic, but I just want to be clear on that issue.

As for re-greasing the rails and worm screw of the floppy.  That's a good idea and would certainly be one of the first things I would try.

[Ral-Clan]

Good idea.
Gonna pay my former boss another visit after Christmas. I'm sure he can work something out. He's got plenty of floppy drives and quite a few ATA to USB adaptors.

Oh, another thing. I don't think PC floppy drives use the ATA standard or ATA connectors.  That was for IDE hard drives and stuff like that.  PC (and Amiga) floppy drives used their own special ribbon connectors with 34 pins.  So ATA to USB connectors won't work with PC floppy drives.

Oh, and when you open up your Amiga floppy drive and re-grease the rails and worm screw, please make sure you don't get any grease on the read/write heads.