how to format amiga floppy disks on windows

The Amiga operating system provided raw access to floppy disks via a driver called vice. Commodore licensed CrossDOS from its authors and bundled it with Workbench 2.1 and higher.

The Amiga could read PC disks formatted with the FAT12 filesystem using third party software called CrossDOS. However, other filesystems could be used, including PFS (Professional File System), AFS (Ami File Safe) and SFS (Smart File System). The Amiga high density disk format is the same as the double disk format, but with 22 sectors per track instead of 11.ĭisks were generally formatted with with one of the Amiga's standard filesystems: OFS (Old File System) natively supported by AmigaOS 1.0-1.2, or FFS (Fast File System) supported by AmigaOS 1.3 and higher. High-density drives were also available from third party vendors. Only the Amiga 4000 ever came with a built-in high-density drive. Sectors could be in any order on a track each sector had a header with its track and sector number.īecause of the Amiga's more flexible control over the floppy disk, the Amiga could read most other physical disk formats, including the PC disks, Apple disks and even Commodore 64 and Apple 5¼' disks with a suitable external disk drive. Amiga disks were typically read or written as entire tracks at once, rather than reading individual sectors. This contrasts with the PC-DOS 720K format which used the floppy disk index hole and careful timing to determine where sectors were located. The Amiga uses an MFM sync word to mark the start of sectors (0x4489, a special MFM-encoding of the byte 0xA1, so it can be distinguished from normal 0xA1 bytes which would be MFM-encoded as 0x44A9). It had 80 tracks per side, 11 sectors per track, and 512 bytes per sector.

The Amiga double density disk format (3 1/2', double sided, double density) was the standard format for disks on all Amiga models.

How to format amiga floppy disks on windows