What am I doing wrong?
 

I got some disks to boot the A500 off eBay, it looked like a good deal, 4 Amiga disks, it says Commodore Amiga Enhancer Software.

It has a Workbench 1.3 with a Workbench 1.2 and a Extras disk with the Extras 1.3 and Amiga Basic 1.2 and an Amiga Kickstart 1.3 Disk for the A1000.

I found a Amiga DOS reference for WB1.3 and looked at making a copy of a disk, I want to make a back up set of disks. So I thought that formatting a disk would be simple...

I want to format several disks as well as format some disks to backup the boot disks.

I keep on getting a bad sector error message or a bad disk error.

I tried entering the CLI and using FORMAT DRIVE DF0: NAME:"AMIGA_BACKUPDISK_0" and it starts by asking for the Amiga work bench disk then the disk that is to be formatted, it then starts the format process and then stops with a bad disk or a bad sector error message.

I have also tried within workbench GUI and the same result.

I have covered the hole of the 1.44 floppy as directed in various forums and youtube videos.

:confused

It could be the floppy drive or the disks. I have about 10 dd disks, only 3 can be formatted without errors.
Try cleaning the floppy drive heads with IPA. Then just try formatting the HD disks until you can get a clean format.
Alternately get hold of some DD disks to try.

Do the HD disks format in the PC O.K?

The disk are former DOS disks that were formatted to MSDOS and attempted to format in the amiga drive.

Workbench runs ok, other disks are readable and I reformatted the disks needing formatting in the Amiga to DOS disks and format fine under DOS and I ran chkdsk a: /R to force moment of any bad blocks sectors.

When I try to chkdsk a disk that has been written to under the Amiga, it has an error reporting that RAW format isn't supported.

The Amiga reports that the disk is bad, some error about a bad sector on the disk, doesn't get past 0 (zero)

Suggestions?

The disk is bad.

HD disks are flimsy and more prone to breaking than 2SDD ones. I would recommend trying to get 2SDD disks off eBay to be sure that it isn't your disk drive acting up (I'm pretty sure your disk drive is fine though).

In any case, any disks you get that were already used have more chances of being bitrot than fresh unopened ones. So try to go for an unopened box of 2SDDs and you might be OK!

Of course, you could just get a GOTEK drive emulator and forget about these issues ;)

These old DD floppy drives cannot format HD disks properly, even with the HD hole covered. They don't even care about the hole. Try to get real DD floppy disks.

ran into the same situation on my 3000d. some disk worked, some didnt, some would format, some wouldnt.

i ended up finding a 3000d drive on ebay listed as something other than an amiga 3000d drive. the seller had pics posted with some info but didnt know he had an amiga 3000d floppy with the drive rails.

i did a bin purchase for $15 and recieved the drive a few days later. hooked it up and no more floppy errors of any type.

the only time i have been able to locate an amiga drive for $15.

now i do all types of searches for stuff i am looking for, some people dont know they have something amiga related and you can get it at a decent price and not the typical bend over prices most amiga parts sellers charge.

I am considering sourcing an external drive. At the moment I am short on funds... So its pretty much a long term project.

Thanks for the input.