Disabling DF0 in A4000D

[K7HTH]

I have installed a Budda/Catweasel combo card in my A4000D and attached two HD IBM floppy drives and all works as advertised. (as far as the Catweasel is concerned.) So I see no need for the Amiga DF0 drive at this time since I can only fit two drives in this case. The only problem is when I disconnect DF0, WB won't release the hour glass in seeking DF0. Before I partitioned my drive into smaller sizes to acoomodate loading the Budda software, I was somehow able to release this seek for the DF0 by WB simply placing a "DF0?" on the WB screen when the drive was unattached. But since I reinstalled WB3.1 the WB does not like DF0 missing. Does anyone know of a way to disable this seek hold so I can use my two IBM drives only? Thanks.

[kd7ota]

Not sure what would actually be causing the problem. I only used OS 3.0, and when I completely disconnected the floppy, I think it disabled it, but I am not too sure if it did.

Best thing to do is to see if there is some jumper maybe to disable it completely?  :-?

Anyone else know how to fix this?

[itix]

Have you tried "Assign DF0: DISMOUNT" in your User-Startup? This eliminates DF0 from your system and should save from trouble.

[K7HTH]

itix wrote:
Have you tried "Assign DF0: DISMOUNT" in your User-Startup? This eliminates DF0 from your system and should save from trouble.

I will have to try that. Thanks for the tip!

[Effy]

itix : yeah, thanks from me too, had the same problem and never heard of DISMOUNT before  :-)

[PaSha]

Taken from Happyharddrive.lha on aminet:

5.1a) We will first deal with having no drive DF0:, as this is an easier solution, once you know what you are doing.
Get the ribbon cable from the floppy drive, and with a piece of wire, connect pin 10 to pin 2. You can just stick the wire into the holes, and that should make a connection. What this does is fools the amiga into thinking there is never a disk in DF0:, but that it does work. Once this is done, take the ribbon cable and fold it triangularly so that the cable fits underneath where the floppy drive was.

Technical background to 'No DF0: hack

This pulls DISKCHANGE low when DRIVE SELECT 0 is low. What this means is that when the amiga polls the disk drive to say 'hello, are you there and is there a disk in?' it says 'hello, yes i am and no there isn't.'

Originally we had tried just pulling READY low permanently, but this made READY low all the time for all drives.
This meant the amiga detected DF0, DF1, DF2 and DF3 whether they were there or not. Then we tried the same with DISKCHANGE, and this detected the right number of drives, but did not let any of them signal a disk.

So it was only when we found the drive pinouts in Dick Diederik's PCFloppy2Amiga project, that we could link DRIVE SELECT 0 straight to DISKCHANGE, thus allowing any external drives to be used, but disabling DF0 and avoiding any wait states.

So there you go, the easiest, cleanest and best solution.

-Paul

[lionstorm]

well you could decrease the boot priority of DF0 or increase the boot priority of the other devices.
Lio

[K7HTH]

@PaSha

Thanks for the info. The string in user-startup did not work. I prefer hardware solutions like this.  

[K7HTH]

Works great! Thanks again!  :banana: