5.25" disk drive

This wont help you much, but I have an unmarked 3rd party 5.25" Amiga floppy drive. It holds 880kB on a double sided disk.
Diskchange cmd is needed, afair, because a 5.25" drive wont be able to tell whether it has a disk or not.

I never had to use a specific mountlist or anything, it just worked =)

Another thing. It won't work as anything but DF2:. Im sure there's a switch somewhere, but I never found it.

5.25" floppies/drives are/were available in sizes up to 1.2MB.

I believe thats what IBM PC/AT came with as standard.

[MikeB]

God! I am surprised!

Whats the point in having a 5.25 inch drive for the Amiga??
obviously i take back what i say! : )

[MikeB]

@Burseg

Sorry!

And you part correct about where my names from.
Email me if you want details.

[redrumloa]

Whats the point in having a 5.25 inch drive for the Amiga??

Waay back when dinasaurs romed the earth in the mid 1980's, hard drives were prohibitively expensive, and 3.5 floppy disk were far more expensive than 5.25 floppy disks. The idea was to enable Amiga users to be able to use cheaper 5.25 floppies, for which they probably already had a ton of if they had upgraded from a 8bit C=(or other 8bit micro).

IMO it didn't catch on that well, although eventually 3rd party(Aminet/FFish)software allowed the reading of other media such as C=64/128 floppies in these 5.25 drives.

[Kronos]

@Desmon

Mine didn't need a diskchange command as someone had wisely
clued a small push-button to the closing-knob of the drive
(on the inside of course). The button was connected to the
diskchange-signal on the floppy-port .... voila !

And that the way I bought "brand new", a nice little left over
from East-Germany's IT-industry.

[Jiffy]

I have an external 5.25" (no further markings) for the Amiga at my home. It has on on/off switch, a 40/80 selector and doesn't need the diskchange command. It also does not need a mountlist entry, in contrast to Commodore's 1020 diskdrive.

Never really used the drive, and it is going to be sold tonight with the rest of my Amiga 500 set. I prefer to use my A1200 and A2000...

BTW: the 40/80 switch is not for switching between single & doublesided. It's meant for switching between 40 and 80 tracks, both doublesided. At 80 tracks, it can hold 880 KB per disk, which would enable you to do a diskcopy from a standard 3.5" disk and at 40 tracks it holds 440 KB, which is the same as the A1020 had. The A1020, in Commodore's infite wisdom, wasn't capable of using 880 KB disks, only 440 KB...

[Desmon]

@Burseg

I'm seriously looking for information on how to read, or even format disks with this device.

C:DiskChange will be your friend.

Most 5.25" drives don't recognise the Amiga "diskinsert" message and the OS has to be told to look at the drive again to ascertain the volume name and other data.
Make sure the DiskChange command is in your C: directory and enter it into a shell window.

1.> DiskChange DF1:

should do the trick..

[Desmon]

@Kronos

Mine didn't need a diskchange command as someone had wisely
clued a small push-button to the closing-knob of the drive
(on the inside of course). The button was connected to the
diskchange-signal on the floppy-port .... voila !

And that the way I bought "brand new", a nice little left over
from East-Germany's IT-industry.

That's a nice little addition. I wonder why nobody else came up with this for the third party drives sold out here?

[Jope]

I have an external 5.25" (no further markings) for the Amiga at my home. It has on on/off switch, a 40/80 selector and doesn't need the diskchange command. It also does not need a mountlist entry, in contrast to Commodore's 1020 diskdrive.

Exactly.

In 80 track mode, the drive functions just like any external disk drive. 40 track mode isn't really of any use. :-)