Format 720kb IBM floppies to 880kb Amiga format?

[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.

[persia]

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...

[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.

[spirantho]

Not if he wants to use Amiga formatted floppies, no.

[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.

[djos]

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.

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.

[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).

[djos]

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).

Yep:

• drive to electronics store, buy non-conductive electronics grade grease and isopropyl alcohol
• open case, remove fdd, remove fdd cover (if it has one), use isopropyl alcohol on lint free cloth to clean the long worm-drive gear etc and the 2 guides that the head mechanism slides up and down on (look for evidence of dry or old grease to know where to clean).
• apply grease to dry part of lint free cloth and thouroly cover areas just cleaned with fine coating of grease.
  
• plug drive back in with cover still off and use a head-cleaning disk on drive about a dozen times till you can see head mechanism moving smoothly and quietly.

that should do it and the heads will get a good clean too. :)

[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.

[spirantho]

Just to be clear: A USB device will not work at all. The controller is completely wrong for Amiga formatted disks.
You need a specialised floppy controller like a  Catweasel or Kryoflux, or you might get lucky with a PC's controller using the ADFread hack.

[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.

[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.

[scuzzb494]

Or you could just by a head cleaning kit and clean the head. I had the same problem with a number of Amigas. Seems that some disks have this affect on the drive. never happens with any of my original disks, only with older copied disks that I acquire. I just drop the fluid on the cleaning disk and pop in the drive and all works fine.