PC Floppies

[Steve]

Is there anything wrong with using PC high density disks as Amiga disks with a piece of tape over the hole. Can you format the taped PC disk on the Amiga as an 880k Amiga disk. PC disks are much easier to get hold of than Amiga DD disks unfortunately. I'm sure I remember doing it when I used to have an Amiga. Are there any downsides to doing this. I'd like to start putting ADFs onto PC HD disks to use on a new Amiga 1200 tower computer I'm buying soon. :)

[Overdoc]

Well, it depends on exactly which type of diskdrive you have in your Amiga.
I have an A-500 with a Chinon FB354 and I never had problems with HD disk. I even don't have to cover the hole since my drive doesn't have a pin for recognizing the hole anyway.
But I have heard from other people that they either could only use HD disks by covering the hole or couldn't use them at all !
HD disks need a higher magnetizing level which some diskdrives cannot supply.
I can only advise you to simply test it.
But don't be happy too early if you copied something onto a HD disks and it works, because if you have a drive that cannot supply enough magnetizing power than the disk might work the first weeks but then loose it's data over time.
Anyway, since you are going to have a new A-1200 tower chances are high that it will have a newer drive that can write to HD disks. ( some late Escom A-1200s even had PC-HD drives built in via a small board )

@Samurai:
I never tried that but I have heard of it, too.
Also a mate of mine used one DD-disk for HD this way back then, so I think it works. :)

[Drake1009]

My brother tried the DD to HD disk by drilling a hole. It depended on the brand of disks how well it worked, but many of them was to be discarded afterwards.

As for using HD as DD disks. My drive can read some HD disks and also write to them. Errors will appear every now and then with time. But not only that, every time I try to verify the data on the drive it fails. Even if it reads right normally, a verification procedure will fail.

[Akira]

Originally posted by Drake1009
My brother tried the DD to HD disk by drilling a hole. It depended on the brand of disks how well it worked, but many of them was to be discarded afterwards.

Yeah, they fuck up after some time, because methinks HD disks are built with a different density thing in them, or something. But HD disks as DD disks work JUST fine. Just remember to tape the hole, otherwise you might get a couple of errors (you get verify errors when writing, always, and sometimes the drive wont want to read the disk, thsi happened to me the other day after I removed teh tape from a game)

Some newer drives do not even need the hole to be taped.

Amass heaps of HD disks with confidence :)

[Steve]

Originally posted by Akira


Yeah, they fuck up after some time, because methinks HD disks are built with a different density thing in them, or something. But HD disks as DD disks work JUST fine. Just remember to tape the hole, otherwise you might get a couple of errors (you get verify errors when writing, always, and sometimes the drive wont want to read the disk, thsi happened to me the other day after I removed teh tape from a game)

Some newer drives do not even need the hole to be taped.

Amass heaps of HD disks with confidence :)

WOOHOO!! :laughing

[Unregistered]

Originally posted by s4murai
I used this method as well and never had problems with it.

Speaking of this:
I read in an old Amiga diskmag that you could make HD disks out of DD ones by drilling a hole in it at the corresponding place. Is this true? I can't imagine this.

yeah - a friend of my family does/did this all the time.! so i t must work!

[oldpx]

Errors will appear every now and then with time. But not only that, every time I try to verify the data on the drive it fails. Even if it reads right normally, a verification procedure will fail.

They are floppies after all, they can't live forever! When my floppy drive needed to be replaced, they placed a HD drive instead of a DD one and I think they made no modifications to the drive to make it compatible so it refused to work with some games afterwards, surprisingly it worked sometimes and always with workbench, maybe there was some modification after all. The very last drive I used with my 1200 was a properly converted HD one. Just wanted to note that these things also happen on earth :D.