formatting amiga discs for use with pc help

[ste182]

Im struggling to format discs on my amiga to use on my pc, everytime i insert the disc in the pc its asking me to format it, is there a special way to do it?

[mongo]

Why not use your PC to format disks to use on your PC?

[ste182]

well basically im wanting to use a floppy disk to move adf files, and i heard you have to format it to 720kb or something but i dunno how to do this, pc format only lets me do 1.4mb and someone said its possible

[ChuckT]

If you want to copy files from Amiga to IBM, I suggest using 3 1/2 inch disks that come pre-formatted for the IBM at any office store because the formatted (physical) space is larger than putting an Amiga disk into an IBM to format or you won't be able to copy a whole disk at once because the volume sizes are different.

[ste182]

well ive formatted them now but my new problem is copying whdload ovr on a floppy, ive got the error "falied crc error" when copying and also "error opening installer" when trying to install it. any light on this?

[hayashi]

Hmm... I've been able to format 720kB disks fine on a PC, but then again I was using the Windows 98 disk formatter and then a Linux formatter (KFloppy), and using specially bought 720kB double-density disks because I read somewhere that HD disks that had already been formatted HD (as all mine are) will never work in a DD drive.

[ChuckT]

What I remember is the Amiga disks are 880K with less after formatting and the IBM disks are 720K or something like that on a double density disks but I always format mine at around 1.4.

[Flashlab]

Unable to open tool Installer

Format 720k floppy under Windows XP

As you can see there's is a lot of info already on this site. So may I suggest you do search on the forum before you start opening topics? It keeps the forum clean and you'll have instant answers to your questions without waiting for someone to answer your posts.

[persia]

I'd look into networking or using a flash drive, floppies were annoying when they were in common use and didn't age well into today.  I had somebody a first year student come in with one and he couldn't figure out what it was but thought in might contain useful info from a decade or so ago, I explained about floppies and we found a drive in an old student computer in the backroom and tried to read it.  After much work we got maybe half of the information off of it.  I consider that a win.  

[pyrre]

well. i don't get what all the fuss is about.

Do you have the dosdriver for "pc0" disks?
Usually it is located in storage/dosdrivers

If so, just put pc0 in devs/dosdrivers. Reboot and format the DD floppy in workbench as pc0. Just don't put trash in it.

I have never had any problems with that.
before i got the zip drive to read pc formatted zips it was the only way i hat to copy files from pc to amiga...
And it always worked. the amiga was even slightly faster at formatting pc disks than mu pc was...

[Floid]

Most Amiga floppies (pre-1200 and 4000) are DD.  If you're trying to reformat a HD disk with the old DD standard, you need to cover the HD hole.

I'm not sure I've ever encountered a material that can do this reliably, short of epoxy.  But for sneakernetting you can hack something up, or use a slip of index card or similar to ensure the switch in the PC's HD floppy drive is held down.

[Daedalus]

ChuckT wrote:
What I remember is the Amiga disks are 880K with less after formatting and the IBM disks are 720K or something like that on a double density disks but I always format mine at around 1.4.

You're mixing things up here. There's nothing special about "Amiga" disks. Buying PC formatted disks won't help at all. Basically there are Double Density (DD) disks and High Density (HD) disks. DD disks are 1MB in size and HD are 2MB. When formatted however, a DD disk can hold 880KB on an Amiga or 720KB on a PC, and an HD disk can hold 1.76MB on an Amiga or 1.44MB on a PC.

The problem here is that most Amigas come with a DD drive as standard, so they can't read HD disks - whether formatted for the PC or the Amiga. It just doesn't work. So what you need to do is get hold of DD disks, or format an HD disk as a DD disk. This is probably easier done on the Amiga side, but you must remember to tape over the hole on the right of the label (not the write protect one, the other one). If you don't, the PC will think it's an HD disk and try to read it at 1.44MB, not the 720KB that it's formatted with. Covering the hole will make the PC drive identify it as a 720KB disk and it should read fine.

[Daedalus]

ste182 wrote:
well ive formatted them now but my new problem is copying whdload ovr on a floppy, ive got the error "falied crc error" when copying and also "error opening installer" when trying to install it. any light on this?

CRC errors are common when you're using CrossDOS, especially with old disks or HD disks formatted as DD disks. Your best bet is possibly to see if you can get a good disk and use it to get Fat95 onto your Amiga. It supports long filenames, and has better error handling than CrossDOS.