Format Harddrive to Amiga F.S. in Windows?

[mikeymike]

If you want to have more luck looking for what you want, I'd suggest looking for a filesystem driver for Windows rather than a format utility.  A format utility is quite simple to design in comparison to getting the OS to use the partition safely

I strongly doubt you'll find it for Windows.  Some UNIX variants have at least Amiga FFS support (warning: the name Fast File System isn't just Amiga-related).

I'd suggest getting WinUAE to use a path as a volume on AmigaOS under emulation, then when you want to 'put it back' in your Amiga, network transfer via FTP or something.

- edit - Oh, I should have said - if Windows can't read the filesystem, it won't mount it as a drive.  So cast aside thoughts of partitions only being readable in WinUAE :-)

[mikeymike]

Does the Linux FFS driver support write operations?

I don't know.

[mikeymike]

@ amigaguy

After it's formated(and put back into the WinUAE machine) you should be able to use it in WinUAE. Windows won't recognize the drive at all (won't assign it a letter and it won't show up when you click on MyComputer). But WinUAE will be able to see it when you set WinUAE up to use a real Amiga formatted HD.

Do you believe that after reading something reliable that says it can do that?  Otherwise I seriously doubt it will work, because it would require WinUAE to reinvent the wheel in disk access for itself, and probably would require admin privs to run on NT/2k/XP.

Thinking about the other recent WinUAE thread and NT4, and someone saying that recent versions of WinUAE won't work on NT4 (which I doubt also, unless they know it for a "tried it, been there, watched it fail myself" fact), I thought for a second that it could be a recent DirectX function to allow direct disk access, but I seriously doubt that also, as it would pave the way for viruses/trojans to do very nasty things to a disk very easily.  And what would be the point in DX having such a function, I can't think.

[mikeymike]

@ Amigaguy

Hmm, curiouser and curiouser.  I wonder why the JIT won't work on NT4.

Btw, I've never had any problems updating DX on 2k, if you're worried.  :-)