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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: ArchM on August 08, 2007, 01:49:09 AM
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Howdy guys. So about 9 months ago I bought a CD32 with an SX-1, hard drive, floppy drive and mouse. I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AMIGAS. I truly bought it to play the games, not to tinker with the hardware. That stuff goes well beyond my skills.
Anyways, I just got around to hooking it all up and testing it. The CD32 works great. The SX-1 works great, I think. It boots up to a Workbench screen. I only have one floppy disc game at this point however, and it doesn't seem to be working.
Here is how it goes....I turn on the CD32, and the Workbench screen comes up. I then put the first disc of the game into the floppy. It starts spinning, and making a horrible grinding sound that drives my cats insane. I tried another disc from the same game, and the same thing happened.
So I opened up the floppy drive, thinking maybe it needed some mild lubrication or something? Well, I got it apart and the thing spun perfectly smooth. So I thought maybe it was the disc itself?
I tried putting some old floppy disc in the drive (from a PC) just to see if it made the same noise, and it did not - it spun smoothly. Obviously it couldn't READ the disc, but it spun quietly just the same.
When I put in the Amiga disc, after it grinds out for about 4 seconds, it stops, and a DF0 icon pops up on my Workbench, with ???? written after it. Looks something like DF0/???? I think.
Is this where I should be seeing the name of the game IF it were working? Like I said, I know virtually nothing about the system, nor the OS. The book from my game however, says that I should be loading the disc into my DF0, whatever that means.
Any help would be appreciated, otherwise I may just have to buy another game on the internet to test it out.
Thanks guys,
Michael
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There's a chance the disk is toast, but more likely is that it's what we call a Non DOS Disk - the copy protection of most Amiga games means you can't read them from Workbench as they contain custom loading, compression, and protection routines.
Put the disk in the drive BEFORE turning on the machine - that's how it was intended to be loaded. Also look into WHDLoad (http://www.whdload.de) to install it to the hard disk.
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Alas, I put the disc in while the CD32 was completely turned off, turned it on, and the same thing happened.
Lots of grinding noise, and an icon that pops up saying "DF0:????"
I will take a look at the WHD Load, but it's getting late here and I am off to bed.
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Alright, that's not good. There's still a chance it's okay, though. Amiga drives use something called boot priority to determine what device to boot from. DF0 is forced to 5, I'm not sure what the CD32's CD drive is, but hard drive partitions are adjustible - if yours is higher than 5, it'll always override booting from DF0. You can use HDToolbox to modify it, but you need to know the device name the hard drive is connected to - most Amigas use scsi.device (even IDE ones), but I don't know if the SX-1 does.