Amiga floppies size

[paul1981]

Was it diskspare also that enabled HD floppies to be formatted to 1.9MB? Or am I getting my devices mixed up?

I remember using this to achieve 1.1MB capacity on my A1200 IIRC:
http://aminet.net/package/docs/hard/HiDensity

At least I think it was that. Oh, also, is it 'floppy's' or 'floppies' anyone?

[paul1981]

The diskspare.device was acceptance replacement when I tried it on my Amiga in mid 90s however it was unstable on certain cheap and old disks. Since diskspare.device had to be loaded before it could be used it was usable only on HD systems. But when you have HD why use floppies?

IIRC when I only had 30MB harddisk on my A600 I used diskspare.device to store some lesser utilities to floppies. I was always short on disks so I wanted to cram more stuff.

The UK magazine Amiga User International distributed coverdisks formatted with diskspare.device, I think they did this from about '95. So you had to use diskspare if you ever wanted to read their coverdisks. They were crammed full of compressed goodies though, all 984KB's worth. I miss that magazine.

[paul1981]

Okay, I get the floppies could be setup (formatted) from 837k to 984K...

But what is the "normal" formatted number?

TIA

You can't boot a FFS floppy (880KB) from a 1.3 Kickstart, but you can use FFS floppy's from Workbench 1.3 with Fast File System installed (Workbench 1.3.2 or above has the FFS included).

You can boot a FFS disk from any 2.0 Kickstart or above Amiga. And of course, all Kickstarts can boot OFS (Original File System) disks (837KB).

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong anyone, as I haven't used 1.3 for a number of years.