Floppy drive doesn't format disks

[Sim085]

Hello, I have a floppy drive on my a1200. This works fine when coming to read disks but doesn't format disks. When I try to format a disk (quick format) it takes some time and then says not a dos disk.

I know the short answer is that the floppy drive is broken, but given that it works fine to read disks I was wondering if there is a way to save it and fix it.

[mark_k]

Are you using double density (not HD with an extra hole) disks? Also, if the disk hasn't already been formatted for the Amiga, you can't use the QUICK option.

[Sim085]

You are right mark_k, when I didn't use Quick option it worked.

Something else strange I noticed is that PC disks don't format from Workbench Format option, but when I used XCopy they did format. What so that about.

Originally Posted by mark_k

Are you using double density (not HD with an extra hole) disks? Also, if the disk hasn't already been formatted for the Amiga, you can't use the QUICK option.

[Daedalus]

If you're talking about PC disks as in HD type floppies, it could be that the drive is detecting the HD indicator on the disk and producing an error since the Amiga can't actually deal with HD disks. XCopy accesses the floppy drive in a very low level way and could well be avoiding the issue in that way. If that's the case, you can cover the HD indicator hole with tape and format using Workbench, but doing that can cause issues with the disk later on.

[Sim085]

The disk looks to work normal after I format (without taping the extra whole), I copied some files, read them from disk, deleted.

I was always under the impression that PC disks are impossible to convert with an amiga drive.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

If you're talking about PC disks as in HD type floppies, it could be that the drive is detecting the HD indicator on the disk and producing an error since the Amiga can't actually deal with HD disks. XCopy accesses the floppy drive in a very low level way and could well be avoiding the issue in that way. If that's the case, you can cover the HD indicator hole with tape and format using Workbench, but doing that can cause issues with the disk later on.

[Daedalus]

I'm not sure what you really mean by convert. Floppy disks aren't a particular platform, other than how they're formatted - the formatting process sets up the disk as an Amiga, PC, Acorn, Mac etc. disk. Reformatting it allows you to overwrite the previous setup with one suitable for any platform. What might be happening is the difference between DD and HD disks, which isn't a PC/Amiga thing, but a DD/HD drive thing. You *can* convert between them, which sometimes requires covering the detection hole (HD->DD) or punching a hole in the disk (DD->HD), but in general this can have reliability problems so isn't really recommended.

Fitting a HD drive to the Amiga will let it read and write HD disks just fine.

[MigaTech]

Why has no-one asked Sim085 if his A1200 is an Escom version? < Could be that he has a conversion issue when they replace the Shugart FDD, for the PC type.

[Daedalus]

Because an Escom A1200 can still format disks fine, it's the reading of funky copy protection disk formats and custom track loaders that cause issues with those machines - system-legal reading and writing aren't a problem.