Formatting 720KB Floppy under XP/Vista

[Harrison]

I could never get hot swapping to work for zip disks on my A4000 and a scsi zip100 drive. It always used to work like an HD where I had to put a disk in the drive before booting the system. If I tried to swap them over while the system was on it got confused, asking for the old disk and not recognising any new ones. Any ideas?

[Buleste]

I had a scsi version on my old Blizzard scsiIV and it worked fine but at the moment I use the IDE version which treats the ZIP drive like a large floppy drive. There is a zip controller programme that you can use which allows you to eject disks but it always seemed a stupid way to do things to me as it's easier pressing the eject button than finding a programme, running it and the clicking the eject command. This is a similar sort of commodity to do that.

[Namida]

May be that although you have FAT95 installed as the CF is not set as a CrossDOS device the Amiga is writing onto an Amiga formatted card whilst the PC is trying to write onto a PC formatted card and so the files cannot be read by the other machine.

Thank you for the hint !
I am new to Amiga 1200 so I am not sure what to use for editing the file and what to change into the file, but I think it will be okay (there is enough documentation and posts to read around).

Anyway I'll post the result as soon as I am back home in a few days.

Has anyone ever managed to get a multi format card reader working with an Amiga? Either an IDE or USB version. Obviously you would need drivers.

I am not sure to understand.
But I think the CF was not seen as a HD as I could remove it and insert another one while the WB was runing without any problem.
It was like inserting a normal floppy.
Also it wasn't seen has a HD as it wasn't listed when opening HD toolbox (cannot remember the exact name, I used it once for preparing the HD with the WB Install floppy).

Just to be clear : I use the PCMCIA port with a CF reader, not the IDE port.

[Harrison]

I can't use a PCMCIA version as I have a network card on that. I have read that you can use card readers with a USB controller on the Amiga. So adding a USB port seems the best solution for me. But the controller cards for USB are expensive so I probably won't go for that.

[Namida]

The other one is have you tried using the latest version of CrossDOS? It may be that although you have FAT95 installed as the CF is not set as a CrossDOS device the Amiga is writing onto an Amiga formatted card whilst the PC is trying to write onto a PC formatted card and so the files cannot be read by the other machine. All you may need to do is copy the CF0 device open up an editor and load the copy and edit it so that the file system is set to crossdosfilesystem, change the file name from "Copy_of_CF0" to "DCF0" and reboot. Hopefully then when you insert a FAT16 or FAT32 formatted CF it should show up and be fully usable by both PC and Amiga.

All right.
I didn't know how to edit the CF0 file, so I copied to a FAT16 formated floppy disk, and did the edtition on my PC (using notepad).
I changed the following :
FileSystem = L:fat95
Device = compactflash.device
to
FileSystem = L:CrossDOSFileSystem
Device = compactflash.device

First I tied to rename it to DCF0 (renamed also CF0.info to DCF0.info), and put it into the DosDrivers folder of DEVS.
But when booting the Amiga, I got two devices mounted and both were fat95 devices.
Then I removed CF0 and booted again.
This time the compact flash was mounted as a CrossDos device, just like when you insert a fat16 formated floppy.

But unfortunately I doesn't change anything.
Files copied to the CF cannot be viewed by the PC, and files copied from the PC cannot be viewed by the Amiga.

I also tried to change the PC0 file instead of the CF0.
I had same result (CF is mounted as a crossdos device but is still not compatible).

Any suggestion ?
Is there anybody who is using a compact flash card with a PCMCIA adaptor and exchanging files between Amiga and PC this way ?

[Buleste]

I'm sorry that hasn't helped. It looks like the FAT95 and CrossDOS devices are doing the same thing so you are probably better off sticking to the FAT95 version until you get a copy of CrossDOS7 and can use the FAT32 file system. I'm not sure what's going on with it I'm afraid. In theory you should be able to swap files with ease but for some reason that's not happening and I don't know why either sorry.

[Harrison]

This is a strange one. I've been experimenting with formatted 720KB DD floppy disks on PCs and Amigas and am still getting regular CRC read errors on the Amiga, and complete disks not being read on the PCs.

Does anyone have any ideas why? I'm using XP on all of the PCs I've so far tried this with, and the Amigas are either an A600 with KS3.1 and WB2.1 or an A1200 with KS3.1 and WB3.1.

Formatting PC floppies always used to work years ago. I used it regularly to take work between University and home in the mid 90's and never had an issue. Could it be Windows XP related? I'm thinking that is the only difference these days because I used to always be using Windows 98 back in the 90's to format or read PC formatted floppies to transfer files over to an Amiga.

I'm going to fire up my old P2 system when I get time as it has Windows 98 installed on it and see what happens if I try transfering files between that and a PC.

Maybe it is finally time for me to ditch the floppy to transfer files and stick a CF card reader in all the Amigas.

[Buleste]

It's nothing to do with XP as I've formatted disks on my 1200 and used them to transfer from my PC with no problems. It may be your floppy drive that has the problem. Have you tried it on different FDD's?

[Harrison]

I've tried a variety of different DD floppy disks and a variety of different Amigas and PC floppy disk drives. All with the same CRC errors. Is very strange.

[Namida]

I'm sorry that hasn't helped. It looks like the FAT95 and CrossDOS devices are doing the same thing so you are probably better off sticking to the FAT95 version until you get a copy of CrossDOS7 and can use the FAT32 file system. I'm not sure what's going on with it I'm afraid. In theory you should be able to swap files with ease but for some reason that's not happening and I don't know why either sorry.

I thought I needed to format the compact flash card on a PC (because it must be FAT16), but in fact if I do so then files cannot be read on the Amiga.
So there was only one thing I should have tried earlier : formating the CF on Amiga !

The problem is maybe due to my PC (running XP) ?
Because I couldn't find anywhere that the CF *must* be formated on Amiga and not PC.

Problem solved.
Thank you all for your support