Basic question: duplicating my workbench and kickstart floppies?

[ifkz]

My searches fail me; can someone run through the steps to duplicate both the kickstart and workbench 1.3 floppy discs from originals? I am brand new to the Amiga ecosystem and I only have a keyboard for my 1000 model. While I wait for parts, I figured a good project would be to copy these discs. I plan to tape over the capacity hole on some PC formatted 1.44MB floppies (which I also do not know if that will work as a substitute for the 880KB floppies the Amiga uses).

 

[ajk]

1.44 floppies will work as is, there is no reason to tape over the hole; the double density drives the Amiga uses don't have the switch which probes that feature.

Making copies of Workbench and Kickstart should just be a matter of using the "duplicate" function in the menus. Some disk swapping will be involved as an entire floppy won't fit into the RAM of the A1000 at the same time, but it should prompt you with instructions as you go.

Here is a video, although he has two drives and some other extras installed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiPxoU1vtCw

 

[ifkz]

That is exactly what I needed, and thank you for the tip on the 1.44MB PC floppies!

 

[Sardine]

be careful using 1.44 mb disks, the incompatible track layout can cause issues and random track errors. if the data is important try and get some DD disks,

yes HD disks will work but they ain't reliable when written to 880k.

im sure someone with more experience will come along and explain why in more detail.

 

[BLTCON0]

1.44 floppies will work as is, there is no reason to tape over the hole; the double density drives the Amiga uses don't have the switch which probes that feature.

That's true for original DD drives, but nowadays where lots of PC drives have been converted to Amiga standards and are in wide use, quite often the HD switch is neglected and is left there. I've even seen the HD switch present in modded floppy drives sold by Amigakit.
These not-fully converted drives will of course fail with HD disks with the hole still uncovered.

But besides that, what Sardine pointed out is generally true - genuine HD disks have different coercivity from genuine DD disks and require different write profiling, the DD profiling (which the drive will revert to if the hole is covered) doesn't give very reliable writes with HD media.

 

[ifkz]

Thanks to the discussion here, I went ahead and ordered 40 used DD disks for my future Amiga projects. As far as I know, my 1000 model is just as it left the factory.