Solutions for GoTek as External drive (DF1)?

[darksun9210]

yeah i saw the same sort of thing. buy Gotek, take old floppy drive out of external case, replace with Gotek. all happy.

so that's what i did. only it's not so.

my A4000 kept telling me DF2:? for the gotek - now DF0's a bit flakey anyway on my A4k, playing with the floppy jumpers didn't change anything for the better apart from change the eternal drive number. so i thought it might just be the machine.

when i saw this thread, i pulled an A1200 mobo out and fired it up off of a normal workbench floppy in DF0:, with the gotek in the drive case attached externally as DF1.
it showed up in early startup as DF1, but couldn't force a boot from DF1 with a workbench ADF (the only ADF) on the (FAT formatted) USB stick.

when it boots to workbench off of something else, it shows that:- nope, same deal pretty much:-  DF1:unreadable
my gotek is running flashfloppy version 2.13

so i dunno what i need to do to get it to work in an external case. everything i've read just seems to say unplug floppy drive, plug in gotek, all is wonderful. when it's not.

any pointers or advice most welcome

[darksun9210]

Perfect, many thanks for that! 
after a quick read it seems that a gotek jumpered with "S0" will work for both internal and should work for external drives. just depending on the board between the cable and the drive that's in the drive enclosure; you may need to do some futzing about with the FF.CFG file on the USB stick to tell the gotek how to identify itself to the machine.

i'm just using a normal Amiga external drive with the mechanical drive mechanism pulled out and the Gotek swapped in. Not a modded PC drive. I'll swap the old floppydrive back into the case later tonight to see if its the interface board that's generating my "DF1: ? ? ? ? " or "DF1:unreadable" errors. i have a couple of other drives i can try if it is this particular interface board not playing nice.

if that works ok with the old drive, then i'll start playing with the FF.CFG file on the gotek.
will also see if i can upgrade my 2.13 to 2.14 of flashfloppy.

while i've got the gotek out of the case, i'll try it as DF0 on a machine too - to double check i'm starting off from a known good position.

personally i'd be a bit reticent to mod an "original amiga" piece of hardware, and just see if anyones got anything A1010'ish on thingverse for someone to 3D print for me. but i'm a chicken when it comes to case mods these days, so... bok bok bokaaar!

[darksun9210]

ok, so, long story short. if you're using a gotek in an external drive case with the external floppy drive's original connector board, you'll have to change the jumper the gotek to S1 from S0 - which is the default.

S1 or DS1 (drive select 1?) my understanding basicly tells the amiga it's drive "2 of 2" - as per the old PC days of A: and B:. But the amiga goes "stuff that", I can "free map" the drive ID of an S1 (DS1) jumpered ID of a drive to whatever the next logical unit is in MY chain. "S0" is basicly saying "i'm the first drive in the chain" - or the default for the internal drive. so an S0 on the outside of the case conflicts with the internal expected/forced S0 drive that should be sat at DF0's position, unless you do some funky stuff to have the amiga expect DF0 on the outside, not the inside.

so i know i'm probably not telling a lot of people here anything they didn't already know, but as i have to deal with floppies so rarely, and the drives even less, this info isn't exactly at the forefront of the old cranial grey matter these days.

i'm just chuffed now i've got a gotek i can switch around between machines. I'm also chuffed that my old Roctek, Cumana, and some other slim external floppy drive; that i've had in a box for the last god knows how long, still work fine. even after my stripping them down to see what worked with what this evening.

the big hint was when none of my "internal" drives from my A500/600/1200, would work in either the Roctek or Cumana interface boards. and the same for the Roctek and cumana drives, not liking being placed as internal drives.

live and learn