Amiga 1200 internal disk drive

[witchmaste]

Hi!

I bought a used Commodore Amiga 1200 from ebay, but the internal disk drive isn't working! The internal disk drive won't boot disks at all, it has the normal sound when waiting for a disk, but when I insert a disk it spins up and the kickstart screen dissapears for a few seconds and then comes back. I also got an external drive from which I can boot workbench. In workbench when I insert a disk in the internal drive I get an icon with "df0:". Is the internal drive defect, or is this a problem with the motherboard? Can I install an internal disk drive from an amiga 500 to test?

[witchmaste]

I will test these things later today. Thanks for all the help so far, this must be the most effective forum I have ever seen  :-)

[witchmaste]

I opened the amiga 1200 today, but the disk drive didn't boot disks with the cover off either, I'm afraid. I also took the disk drive out of my amiga 500 but I realized the red wire of the drive data cable was on the other side than on the amiga 1200. On the amiga 1200 the red wire was on the left of the drive and on the 500 to the right. All amiga disk drives should have the same pinouts, right?

[witchmaste]

Never mind the post before, I tested an a500 drive in the a1200 and it worked so the original drive is broken. I alos tried cleaning the heads but it didn't work, it just won't read disks. I saw they sell floppy drives for the a1200 on vesalia.de (both for commodore mainboard and escom). Are these 100% compatible with all amiga software?

[witchmaste]

I fitted an Epson drive from one of my external drives to the a1200 and custom made an eject button. So it's fine for now. I also modified a Panasonic JU-257A606P I found in an old computer at work and put it in the external drive instead. I didn't think I would get it to work but it did, and wasn't very hard to do either. I also found a same model panasomic at home so they seem pretty common, just telling this so you would know a good working pc floppy you can easily find and modify. Well thanks a lot for the help all of you!