Is there some thing that kills Amiga floppy drives, I have replace the cables and can not get one drive to work.( I have 5) can I clean them? Put a magnet on the head? Something, even my external drive will not work. I could get one of those gotex drives but every thing I hav is floppy based.
Have you another Amiga to try the external drive. You may be flogging a dead horse cus it could just be the motherboard.
What Amiga are we talking about ?
By the way doesn't have to be a whole Amiga just a motherboard. Connect the external floppy drive and be very carful not to touch electronic components and switch on. After a while it will boot the floppy even without an internal floppy on the motherboard. Just that you really always need another Amiga in such situations to avoid wasting time.
There are other components by the way that will halt the activity of a floppy drive. I fitted one of these flash cards to an A600 yesterday and it locked the floppy drive out completely. I then swapped it out onto another 600 and worked a treat. If I had only the one 600 I would have rejected the card. There is definitely something wrong with the motherboard and that'll get swapped out. Just becomes a future project and I can get onto other things. There isn't anything wrong with the drive. If I stuck two drives in a machine and both didn't work I wouldn't be thinking the drives were at fault. I would be looking for another problem. Not all control chips are removable easily so that is why I asked which Amiga are we talking about.
On a side note I have a plastic tub full of busted floppy drives. They are all broken from machines I received. I really have no idea what folk do with them to break them like this. None of my floppy drives have failed. My original on my A1200 from 1993 still works. I just keep them clean, don't use rogue disks that look unhealthy. Remove a disk immediately if it starts to make noises and clean them with head cleaning kits. Its all about keeping the kit running and following a few simple house rules. Have an old external for dodgy disks that you collect. Certain degraded floppies can kill a drive almost immediately and each and every subsequent disk will fail. Just clean the heads with a head cleaning disk as soon as this happens and don't put another disk in till its cleared.
I can spot a dodgy disk a mile away. Pretty well all my original disks still work.