Amiga 5 1/4" floppy drives (the biggins!)

[mark_and_a500]

Hi

I have a question about using 5 1/4" floppy discs with Amiga Forever running on a PC i386 / XP Professional 3GB RAM / 1.66ghz. Inside the PC, I have a Catweazle PCI card successfully connected to a 3 1/2" regular PC floppy drive.

I have some 5 1/4" floppy discs discs containing mostly Soundtracker Modules I made when I was a kid. Some are created on an A500 and some on an A2500.

I'd like to access the discs using Amiga Forever.

I have three old 5 1/4" floppy discs drives. One is an Amiga external drive that requires external power (12V I think), one is a PC drive from a really old beast, and the third, an old Mac 5 1/4" drive.

Pictures are here: :rtfm:

http://mc9.co.uk/amiga/drives.html

I've tried connecting the old PC 5 1/4" floppy discs drive using a floppy cable (5 1/4" and 3 1/2" connectors) and the lights turn on, and it seems to be doing something, but every disc I put in shows up as being unreadable. :confused:

After reading some forums, it seems I may need to mod one of these 5 1/4" drives to make it work. I don't mind doing this if I need to. Any help offered is much appreciated!

Thanks,
Mark

[spirantho]

Hi,
The Catweasel can use any of those drives, you don't need to mod anything.

I don't know much about Amiga Forever, but I do know it doesn't use the Catweasel natively, it just allows you to access it from within UAE. You need the Catweasel drivers for the Amiga and then mount the correct drive - I can't remember what it is under OS 3, but there should be a mountlist for it and the Catweasel installer should prompt you to ask what you want.

Let us know how you get on, we can sort this out for you somehow I'm sure! Be sure though you don't need to mod anything for the Catweasel - I know this because I wrote (most of )the Catweasel drivers for OS4 and have tried it.

[J-Golden]

Are you setting the drive type in the PC's BIOS?  You still need to do that, even these days...

[mark_and_a500]

Hi Spirantho and J-Golden

Firstly, thank you for your thoughts, and please accept my apologies for not replying immediately. With two kids and all and work... yadda yadda... :juggler:

J-Golden, thanks for the good suggestion of setting the bios. I hadn't thought of that, and it was set incorrectly. I've fixed that now - that info alone should get me one step closer to success with this.

Spirantho, thanks for the assurance about not having to mod anything. That's good news. It's good to have you there - you must be the most qualified person on the planet to help me through this. :laugh1:

I haven't managed to get this working as yet, however I have purchased a new, longer floppy cable this afternoon which supports 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy drives and is 0.81m long allowing me to get both drives connected at the same time to the Catweasel card. I suspect the floppy cable I am currently using is faulty. The new cable will arrive in a week so I'll come back to this good forum and report back my findings.

Just out of curiousity, are there any 5 1/4" floppy drives on the web for sale which are specifically compatible with amiga formatted 5 1/4" floppy discs? I am pretty sure the OS I was using on my old Amiga 2500 was OS3. It had a built in SCSI drive and I was using an external 5 1/4" drive to backup my song data. It's the same drive pictured in the photo here:

http://mc9.co.uk/amiga/drives.html

And is it at all possible to transfer data using Amiga Explorer / Serial Cable between an A500 (with an attached 5 1/4" drive) and a PC if the data on those 5 1/4" floppy discs came from an A2500 running (i'm guessing) OS 3?

Thanks
Mark

[jorkany]

How old are these disks and when is the last time you successfully read one?

[freqmax]

Do you have the pinout of those drives?

[spirantho]

Hi Spirantho and J-Golden

Firstly, thank you for your thoughts, and please accept my apologies for not replying immediately. With two kids and all and work... yadda yadda... :juggler:

J-Golden, thanks for the good suggestion of setting the bios. I hadn't thought of that, and it was set incorrectly. I've fixed that now - that info alone should get me one step closer to success with this.

'fraid the BIOS setting is just for the on-board - won't affect the Catweasel at all. You should have the BIOS set to just what is on the motherboard connector - probably 3.5" drive A and nothing else, maybe not even that.

Spirantho, thanks for the assurance about not having to mod anything. That's good news. It's good to have you there - you must be the most qualified person on the planet to help me through this. :laugh1:

I think Jens is more qualified than I. He made the hardware!

I haven't managed to get this working as yet, however I have purchased a new, longer floppy cable this afternoon which supports 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy drives and is 0.81m long allowing me to get both drives connected at the same time to the Catweasel card. I suspect the floppy cable I am currently using is faulty. The new cable will arrive in a week so I'll come back to this good forum and report back my findings.

One more potential problem to discount; that's good.

Just out of curiousity, are there any 5 1/4" floppy drives on the web for sale which are specifically compatible with amiga formatted 5 1/4" floppy discs?

The whole point of the Catweasel is that you can read anything using standard drives, so don't worry, you don't need anything special unless you're running directly on an Amiga.

 I am pretty sure the OS I was using on my old Amiga 2500 was OS3. It had a built in SCSI drive and I was using an external 5 1/4" drive to backup my song data. It's the same drive pictured in the photo here:

http://mc9.co.uk/amiga/drives.html

And is it at all possible to transfer data using Amiga Explorer / Serial Cable between an A500 (with an attached 5 1/4" drive) and a PC if the data on those 5 1/4" floppy discs came from an A2500 running (i'm guessing) OS 3?

As long as the A500 is also running OS3, or the disk was formatted with OFS (not FastFileSystem) you should be able to read it yes. I have no experiene with AF, but TwinExpress would do just fine, you could probably even use SerNet and access the floppy as a shared drive directly within AF!

Simplest way would just be to use an Amiga to copy to PC-formatted disks, though!

[mark_and_a500]

Hi Jorkany. Thanks for your reply. The discs are between 22 and 20 years old, but stored in a cool, dry place away from direct sunlight. I've always been careful with them. Although, they have been through airport security at one point a few years ago.

Hi Freqmax, no sadly I don't have a pinout diagram for the drive, but I've taken some photos and uploaded them for you to look at and see what you think. I've taken the drive out of it's housing for these photos so you can see the special wiring mods

The URL is: http://mc9.co.uk/amiga/second_upload/

Hi Spirantho, thanks again for your comments. I've looked on line for TwinExpress to no avail? Is there a place you could recommend where I could download a copy? Also, thanks for the ongoing support with this.

Firstly, I've had some success… I've now got my old A2500 working (in addition to my old A500 1.3). The A2500 is running Workbench version 37.67, Kickstart version 37.175. By chance, some of the files I was looking for may actually be on the internal SCSI drive. I still need to look into this, but now I have more questions, and possibly more possibilities to restore my old 5 1/4" floppy discs. I have around 500 discs of music I composed when I was a kid in total!

I now remember this 5 1/4" external drive was used exclusively with the A2500 and it was custom made with a special switch at the back of it which switched between modes? Perhaps HD and DD. I really can't remember though. So every disc I'll be attempting to copy from this external 5 1/4" floppy drive to Amiga Forever will be from the A2500 while using Workbench version 37.67, Kickstart version 37.175.

I must also add that I've now successfully connected the A2500 to my PC, now running Windows XP Professional (rather than Home Edition) but with the same specs as my first posting. I've also managed to copy across to my PC the contents of the A2500 hard drive.

Now, problematically… The external 5 1/4" floppy I used all those years ago with the A2500 may be faulty. Or maybe the drive is okay but the internal floppy housing circuitry of the internal floppy connector / power to external disk drive cable may be faulty. The drive powers up okay, but I have not been successful reading any of the old discs I've looked after for so long. I've tried connecting the drive to the A2500 but when connected, it won't boot. The A2500 comes up with a guru meditation error saying "Software failure". Interestingly, when I connect the same external drive to an A500, Workbench 1.3 boots successfully but displays DF1:BAD, DF2:BAD and DF3:BAD on the workbench, even though I have only the one external connected.

So for the questions…

1. Do you think I'd increase my chances of taking the Amiga 5 1/4" external disc drive out of it's housing and installing it into the now working A2500? Do I need a special floppy lead? Is this safe and can the A2500 power supply handle it? The reason why I ask is there is an A2091? SCSI card inside connected to a 12V 8W hard drive.

2. Is it possible that the A2500 writes discs in a different way to the A500? I've read about the OFS vs FFS filesystems. I'm assuming both the A2500 and the A500 use FFS?

I appreciate all comments and suggestions… it's been such a long time since I've tinkered with these wonderful machines.

Mark

[mark_and_a500]

(bump) :bump: