Dumb Question !

[amyren]

Kit came yesterday and I spent several hours last night trying to use it but I seem to have a problem that might be hardware based, everything loads and works great until it comes to write the floppy, the floppy spins up but the head does not move, and thats how it sits until I turn if off. The floppy drive formats and copies discs via the workbench fine but just will not write a disc with easy adf package ....... could it be a bad drive in my A600 or the fact that Its a bog standard 1mb A600, I have tried using both DSDD and DSHD discs, nither will write ?

Any clues ?  :confused:

Thanks in advance

Scott

You could try other software for writing adf files. I remember using a program named ADFBlitzer that worked ok for me with both reading and writing disks.
Check aminet or here:
http://amigamuseum.emu-france.com/Fichiers/Downloads/
(I also think there are other adf programs made)
You also mentioned some dms files. Try to get the dms program from aminet and try to write a dms file to floppy.

A personal experience I had with floppies is that DD disks are more reliable than HD disks when using them in DD diskdrives. I did get a lot more read/write errors when using HD disks on my amiga than with DD disks.
Another tip could be to try to find a cleaning disk for the diskdrive and give it a run.

[amyren]

I have a floppy cleaning kit and have ran that 3 times without any help. I've been messing the both DD & HD discs and both have the same problem. About 2 hours ago, I did finally get a ADF file to burn to a floppy but then the same problem has been happening ever since ...... I really think it may be DF0 as it's now started to error when formatting discs and copying discs using Workbench, I think 11 years in a FREEZING cold loft has done it's worst, I see the disc drives are cheap enough to buy, Are they easy to fit ?

Thanks again for all the help

Scott

Hope the cold loft thing is not the main reason for killing old hardware... I have a cold loft as well and sometimes the outside temperature drops down below minus 35 C. And I have 2 x C64's, 2.5 x A500, 1 x A1200 and one A4000 up there....

As for replacing the floppy drive, it shouldnt be to much trouble. Just make sure you get the  connectors in the right place when putting it together. I think there is no plastic frame for alignment around the connector on the drive, so it can easily be misplaced if you are not careful.

Hopefully this is the problem and changing the drive will fix it. But there is a small chance that it could be a faulty chip. I'm not sure how common this is, but on one A500 I got this problem with read/write errors. It got so bad that every time a disk was insterted, the A500 drive would spin and you heard the sound like the it was doing something on the disk. After this the disks were NDOS disks and not accessable on any amiga. It turned out to be a faulty CIA chip. If I remember correctly there are two CIA chips on the A500, and to test it I simply swapped the chips. (but maybe I remember wrong and that I used a chip from another A500, its a long time ago now)
But in any case, beware these chips. They are fragile, especially to static electricity. So make sure you are properly grounded.