External Floppy Drive question

[Shadowfax]

I was rummaging through my Amiga parts and came across a Chinon FZ-357A Floppy Drive new in the shipping box. (I used to be an Amiga repairman and still have some parts from 12 years ago).

So my question is, has anyone tried to retro-fit this 1.76 meg floppy inside an older extrenal DFx case?

Im thinking it would be neat to have an external portable HD floppy drive to switch between Amiga systems.

Thx

[Shadowfax]

Aye indeed it does. Just bit the bullet and tried it. I used an Amiga 1010 drive for the test. Leaving the HD drive as DS0, I mounted the assembly into the enclosure with a few screws and fired up the A600 using both mouse buttons to get to the boot menu and sure enough, there it was. I was able to boot WB 3.1. Then I daisy-chained a second external drive and all went well.

Where things 'Did'nt' go well was trying to get the drive aligned with the openings of the 1010 enclosure. First thing, the button on the Chinon HD floppy is wider than that of the A1010, and the new drive sits lower then the orignal 1010 drive does. So rather then take a butcherknife to the enclosure, I aborted the mission and restored everything back to it's orignal condition.

Atleast I know now it will work.

Thanks for the reply, kd7ota.

[Shadowfax]

If memory serves me correctly, The connector for a 1.2mb 5.25"  
floppy is an edge card type connector. I have seen adaptors that convert these types to a 32 pin ribbon connector. If you can find one of these at a local ventage computer dealer (or a Goodwill computer shop), you may be able to physicaly connect it via the ribbon cable inside your A1010 drive case. Also keep in mind that the power connector is also different as it takes a larger connector header plug, so an adaptor for that is also required.

Then comes the proper commodity to be able to recognise the drive as a PC1 external floppy drive. Editing a PC0 datatype commodity (crossdos) to point to DF1 may address this. Placing this datatype in the DOSDRIVERS drawer of your DEV drawer should do the trick. However, crossdos was not supported directly until AmigaDos 2.1 and the kickstart 2.1 rom for most of the later models of Amigas.

Workarounds for A1000's may be available on AmiNet for this type of modification.

Hope this helps.

[Shadowfax]

Keep in mind, the Amiga has it's own idea about floppy drives and that the speed of the drive (RPM's) is one of the parameters that dictate if a floppy drive is compatable or not.

I wished I had an Amiga 1000 to help test what I described above, but my exposure with Amiga PCs' started with the A500. I know that the A1000 needed a kickstart disk to get it to boot up (Insted of a kickstart rom), but I've never owned a 1000. I would venture to say that you need to add a mount string in your [S: Startup-sequence] of your boot floppy or hard drive.

The Startup Sequence file is simply a text file that the Amiga reads during boot up that tells the system what to execute, display, and mount during bootup.
_________________________________________________________
Heres information about the 'Mount' command:

Format: MOUNT |FROM |
Template: DEVICE/A,FROM/K
Purpose: To make a device connected to the system available.
Path: C:MOUNT

Specification:

MOUNT causes the AmigaDOS to recognize devices connected to the system. When the MOUNT command is issued, MOUNT looks in the DEVS:Mountlist file {or the optional FROM file} for premeters of the device that is being mounted. MOUNT commands are usually placed in the Startup-sequence file.
__________________________________________________________

In addition to this, I found a reletive file on the AmiNet site that may help you.

Point your browser to: AmiNet/Hard/hack

 ... and scroll down to Drv-1.44.lha (This is a 1.44 PC floppy to Amiga hack. There are other hacks/info down that list as well.

I use Power Archiver to unzip .LHA files to my WinXP desktop.

Hope this helps.