Format 720kb IBM floppies to 880kb Amiga format?

[Blinx123]

The severe lack of Amiga tech (which also includes original blank Amiga floppies) in my area had me thinking.

Are those 720kb IBM double-density floppies physically any different from 880kb Amiga double density floppies? Or is this simply a matter of formating these? e. g. could I take a 720kb IBM floppy, format it in CrossDos and write data from an 880kb ADF to it?

[Blinx123]

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

Nice. Thank you very much.

What would be the actual size of a 720kb/880kb floppy then? 960kb?

Seems kind of unreasonable of IBM to waste such a large amount of memory. Is there any particular reason why they did it (copy protection/performance/etc)?

[Blinx123]

DD floppies are 1MB, HD 2MB. Different computers have different efficiency when formatting.
PCs format them at 720KB. Amiga  at 880KB.
I'm not quite sure what are you trying to do ?
If you insert a DD floppy in your Amiga, and format it, it will have 880KB free space. And you can write ADFs on it.

I have a whole bunch of big-box IBM/Tandy games that I'd like to convert to their respective Amiga releases.

Since x86 distanced itself so much from it's own past, I'm not feeling the vibe while playing these games on my PC*


*An Intel i5 2500k rig with a 2GB GTX 680, 16GB RAM a 1TB hardisc and a Blu-Ray drive running those games in Dosbox and outputting them to a 47" TV might sound awesome, but there's nothing classic about it.

[Blinx123]

That's why you grab a cheap 386/486 and throw MS-DOS 6 on there

True.

But that's kinda silly.

A) MS-DOS, while certainly better than Windows Vista, is still nowhere near as good as Amiga OS 3.1

B) An Amiga is such a classic because it never had a true successor. A 386/486 is just another PC and therefore really pales in comparison.

[Blinx123]

That's a good plan
Just go for it. There are no PC and Amiga disks. Just DD floppies. Put them in your Amiga and format them at 880K. A good recipe to enjoy the holidays

Will do.

I've also just acquired a PC copy of Walt Disney's Animation Studio (brand new and still in it's shrinkwrap. My collector's itch was strong that day. Very strong), which I'll gladly convert to Amiga.

That way, I can probably use the remaining last floppy (the Amiga version only requires three while the IBM/Tandy comes on a total of four) for saving animations.

[Blinx123]

I tried turning on my Amiga 1200 for the first time today and already ran into some weird issue.

The workbench floppies I received with my Amiga 1200, although unused, are unreadable.
Whenever I try to boot from any of them, I'll be greeted with the very same message over and over "Not a valid DOS disk in drive DF0:".

Is this usually a hardware issue or something that can be solved by formating the floppies?

How do I find out if it's not my drive, besides throwing another bunch of floppies at it and potentially risking the life of perfectly fine floppies?

[Blinx123]

Frankly, I think it's the drive.

David (davideo) told me I should check again, perhaps remove and push in the disk a few times more and that's basically when the following happened.

1. The disk gets read a little while longer than before (like 8 seconds rather than 3 or less).
2. A message box pops up, saying there is an error on sector block 002.
3. (after I removed the disk and pushed 'retry' again) the drive starts acting up and begins to sound like a rattle snake.
4. (after I turned it off and back on) everything is back to normal and I get the "Not a valid DOS disk" error again.

I hope I didn't screw up a perfectly fine disk now.

I plan on asking my former boss for an HD floppy drive I could modify later today. It sucks, but I'll basically have to cut open the seal on my Amiga and see if there's something wrong inside and if I can't find anything, I'll have hook up that modified HD drive.

[Blinx123]

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.

Sure. But isn't it rather telling already that those disks would all be accessed for less than 5 seconds? Even if the floppies were faulty, shouldn't it still take the drive a lot longer?

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

Yea. It's one of Petros and the disks were included. Everything was still sealed when I received it.

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

That's kinda sad.
I thought floppies were a bit more durable.

I guess that means most of my games will not work either anymore.
What a shame.

[Blinx123]

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?

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.

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?

Furthermore, if the workbench disks turn out to be the culprit, is there any way to install Amiga OS 3.1 without the need of a floppy drive? I don't want to spend money on another set of WB disks. Especially if there's a fair chance these might turn out to be faulty as well.

EDIT: Found the tool I was thinking about. It's called adfread. I'll still need an Amiga floppy drive for it, of course.

[Blinx123]

PCs haven't come with any floppies for a few years now, but couldn't you just plug in a pair of usb floppy drives?  The sell for for 5 or 10 bucks on eBay...

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.

[Blinx123]

You guys are confusing me.

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.

Another thing I've just realized: whenever I remove a disk, the heads will make a short screeching sound and seem to slightly lower themselves.

[Blinx123]

Sounds like the head guides and stepper-motor worm-drive just need re-greasing - hardly surprising for a 15 year old drive that's never been used.

Sounds plausible.
Thanks.

Are there any publicly available instructions I could download? I'm not very hardware savy (at least when it comes to non-synthetic/non-theoretic stuff).

[Blinx123]

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.

Yes. A set of Amiga formatted floppies.

I tried Personal Paint, Wordworth, Whizz and Photogenics.