Dumb question regarding A3KD

[smerf]

Okay, so I picked up this A3000 desktop with 16M zip RAM.

Plugged it in and turned it on.  Floppy drive nor the hard drive work!  !@$#$^%##$!!!!

My question is, what floppy drive do I use?  880K or 1.76M?  Either?  Looks like a regular PC drive will work.  Yeah, no?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Curtis

Hi,

@curtis,

Ok, on my a3000, if the floppy don't work the hard drive don't work either, the first thing to do is check the floppy drive cable. Make sure it is plugged in right, if that don't work try buying a floppy cable for a PC, some of the old amiga's cables have been fussed with so much that they are bent and broken. Your first goal is to get the floppy working, don't mess with the hard drive as of yet, disconnect it and take it out of the A3000, Take a good look at your battery for the clock. Make sure it isn't leaking. Work on one thing at a time, take any extra cards out of the expansion slots. The first goal like I said is to get it to boot, then get it to recognize the floppy drive. Then work from there.

Don't use a PC floppy, I have never had one work right in an Amiga, could be my bad luck, or it could be the Amiga uses a certain type floppy.  Look on Aminet for instructions in this area or search the webb for info.

smerf

[smerf]

Hi,

@curtis

The A1200 floppy should work, the reason that PC floppies don't work is that there are some differences in the plug pin connections on the back end of the Amiga vs the PC drives, another difference was the motor speed, the Amiga floppy runs at half the speed for some reason. Commodore knew what they were doing when they sold you a computer, they made sure you bought all parts from them or third party developers. Once in the while I try PC drives in my Amiga, the only drive that I found that worked as of date was one from an Apricot. It used a chinon drive.
Ok you do need a terminator or another scsi device that has a terminator on it, I use an old scsi Zip drive on my A3000 but yes a terminator can lock up your Amiga. \

You can use any floppy drive out of any Amiga. With PC drives you may find one out of a thousand that work. Now on a A1200 built by Amiga Technologies there was something about the floppy drive but I can't remember, any Amiga loonies out there know the story.

By the way if you are using the external scsi connector, look at it very close, the printer plug is one of the two plugs and both plugs are vertical, meaning one right on top of each other, I can't remember which plug is on top, I think it is the scsi on top and printer on the bottom. Since they both use the same kind of external plug, I can't recall how many times I blew the scsi port out by plugging a printer into it. Lucky thing there was a lot of parts available at the time and I am pretty good with electronic repair.

smerf