High density floppydrive on A2000?

[psxphill]

@Thomas - I thought they were spun at half the rate because of the Paula, not Agnus?

Probably both actually, I'm not sure agnus would be able to give paula more bandwidth.

[psxphill]

Ok, turns out the FZ357 can be made to work.
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=9365

That thread is about using a HD drive with 880k disks, it doesn't do anything for using 1.76mb disks.

AFAIK the A2000 motherboard can only generate the drive ID for a 880k disk, so you need a special drive that can generate either an 880k or 1.76mb ID depending on what disk is in the drive and jumper the A2000 to say the drive is not present (all this does is stop the motherboard generating a conflicting ID). The drive also needs to slow down when you insert a HD floppy of course. This is essentially what an FB357A/FZ357A is, I assume the A means Amiga and without it you can't get HD disks working.

The only other reliable solution were the external laptop drives that Dell offloaded after commodore went bankrupt.

If someone reverse engineered the FB357 and FB357A then it's possible you could figure out how to modify one into the other. It might involve designing a new board which might be a good project for kickstarter.

[psxphill]

this is not true, any Amiga from a500 to 4000t with at least 2x rom and paula will work for high density drives including the 2000. my 2000 has HD floppies in it from a 4k. Even the a1000 can use a HD floppy if softkicked to 2x rom + or a rom board is installed with real 2x rom.

What is not true? Because I can't see what this relates to in my post.

and power computing made a hd drive also,but the power computing one needed drivers,and i find it not utterly reliable-but it may just be the drive i got.

None of the power computing drives were reliable.

[psxphill]

Geeze Louise you guys, I know it's only Monday and all, but:

The A2000 (or A500/A1000) cannot generate the right drive id for a 1.76mb disk, which is why the floppy drive needs to do it.
You need a special drive that does it (like the 357A from an A4000)... Which is the drive mechy used anyway, so I don't get his point.

But yeah it's only Monday.

[psxphill]

All right dude, somebody needs to take a chill-pill.

In my defence I edited the post to make it less aggressive.

Also, this has gotten way off course from OP's original question, which was "can an A2000 use a high density drive?" -- I think that's been answered -- "Yes, it can, under certain conditions".  LOL.  

You can use pretty much any high density drive as an internal Amiga drive pretty easily, you just need to figure out where all the extra signals come from (disk change/ready etc). The problem is using high density disks, for that you need a 357A (which should have all the signals in the right place).

[psxphill]

I prefer - http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=28&products_id=106

Change FZ-357 to 880k amiga drive - I do not know if it fit mechanically in a 2000

The guy specifically wants to be able to read PC 1.4mb disks on his A2000, there is no shortage of drives that can be used to read 880k disks.

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/catweasel3 may be good enough if you can find one.

I have a 1" Chinon HD drive that looks like it was made for the A2000 as it is the same color and also has a lower "lip" plastic piece to fill in the gap.  It works on my A2000 just fine as a HD drive.

It looks like the drive to the LEFT:

Next time you have the A2000 open, can you check if it is an FB 357A? I know commodore said they had stocks of them at some point, but I never saw them for sale in the UK. However this is not unheard of as the dealers aimed more at the low spec machines.