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Author Topic: A1200 Faulty Floopy Drive?  (Read 3187 times)

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Offline Holley

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Re: A1200 Faulty Floopy Drive?
« on: May 15, 2004, 03:31:31 PM »
IIRC in the disk drive's head there's 2 coils, one low power for reading, one high power for writing.  I'd guess the second one in yours might be broken!  I guess you've tried formatting/writing to more than one disk, and have bunged a cleaning disk through - some brand new disks can be duff.

If you only want to write to disk once in a while the easy solution is to just get an external floppy ;-)
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Offline Holley

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Re: A1200 Faulty Floopy Drive?
« Reply #1 on: May 15, 2004, 05:23:22 PM »
@MattH - Would it still read if that was the case, though?

If it starts formatting ok /then/ gets stuck it might be an alignment problem.  Don't suppose you have any other machines to try it in?
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Offline Holley

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Re: A1200 Faulty Floopy Drive?
« Reply #2 on: May 15, 2004, 05:31:02 PM »
Ummm, Matt, what did I say?

Quote
I guess you've tried formatting/writing to more than one disk, and have bunged a cleaning disk through - some brand new disks can be duff


:-P
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Offline Holley

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Re: A1200 Faulty Floopy Drive?
« Reply #3 on: May 15, 2004, 08:00:52 PM »
It should only take a minute or so, and Amigas should be just as fussy as any other DD disks (not as bad as recycling old HD disks).

If you take the floppy out you can carefully pop the top off (they click together, it's easy to figure out how to take 'em apart, but the metal is easy to bend by accident!).  With the top off you can check for fluff etc, but again it's easy to mess up the internals by accident.

If the problem is alignment or a broken head it will be time for a new drive.  If you tried several disks that look ok on the outside (and under the shutter) then it probably isn't them, unless someone else threw them out of course ;-)  Like Matt said, it's worth checking the cable & clearance, but if you've not been in the case already it's unlikely.
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Offline Holley

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Re: A1200 Faulty Floopy Drive?
« Reply #4 on: May 15, 2004, 10:32:58 PM »
At least Robert should be reassured that we're not just pulling this out of nowhere :-) Must admit it's been ages since I've had any problems like this, on an Amiga anyway ...
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Re: A1200 Faulty Floopy Drive?
« Reply #5 on: May 15, 2004, 11:13:16 PM »
Basically you need a spare drive from another Amiga, get your hands on one of the Eyetech convertors that lets you bung in a regular PC drive, or get an external one and use that drive for writing and the other for reading.

(check out, or put up a wanted on, www.AmiBench.com for all three, or someone here may be able to help)
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Offline Holley

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Re: A1200 Faulty Floopy Drive?
« Reply #6 on: May 17, 2004, 07:54:54 PM »
Good for you ;-) A bit of shopping around can locate a reasonable 'bare' A1200 for about £30, always handy to have a spare!
\\"Sex, drugs and rock n\\\' roll are very good for you\\" - Ian Dury