Can anyone fix Amiga Floppy Drives?

[pan1k]

I have a Chinon FB-357A that just died. It reads 880k just fine but will not format anymore. Thinks all disks are write protected. Can anyone here fix these?

[save2600]

I have a Chinon FB-357A that just died. It reads 880k just fine but will not format anymore. Thinks all disks are write protected. Can anyone here fix these?

Did you try to clean the tiny switches near the front of the drive opening yet? If so and that didn't do the trick, Nishtek here has offered to fix drives before. I bet that little switch that determines if the write protect tab is in position or not just needs to be cleaned... contact cleaner and work it (make sure it goes up and down) for a little bit.

[pan1k]

Wow.. about the biggest ball of lint came out of the drive..  will check it when i work on my other A4k.. thank goodness for spare drives!

[amigadave]

I have a Chinon FB-357A that just died. It reads 880k just fine but will not format anymore. Thinks all disks are write protected. Can anyone here fix these?

I have a few extra floppy drives, if you want to come up to my place and pick one up I'll give you a good deal.

I am thinking of putting about 75% of my hardware up for auction on eBay and/or AmiBay in the next few weeks, so come up and let me know what you want besides the floppy drive.

[sbeehre]

Another alternative that I've been using is modifying PC drives to work with Amiga's... its very easy and only involves soldering 2 wires onto the floppy drives circuit board.

1- Set the unit as DS0, instead of DS1 (standard for IBM floppy drives);

2- Route the 34 pin trace to pin 2 and cut it from 34;

3- Join pins 30 & 34.

Works perfectly with any drive, if you locate the ds0/ds1 switch/shunt/selector/whatever. Even with Xcopy and Non-DOS games.

[TheBilgeRat]

Another alternative that I've been using is modifying PC drives to work with Amiga's... its very easy and only involves soldering 2 wires onto the floppy drives circuit board.

1- Set the unit as DS0, instead of DS1 (standard for IBM floppy drives);

2- Route the 34 pin trace to pin 2 and cut it from 34;

3- Join pins 30 & 34.

Works perfectly with any drive, if you locate the ds0/ds1 switch/shunt/selector/whatever. Even with Xcopy and Non-DOS games.

Do you has pics of this trick?  I would love to try this with a freebie drive I have.

[sbeehre]

Do you has pics of this trick?  I would love to try this with a freebie drive I have.

No problem i will do that later on... the model of drive I'm using is an Alps DF354H022F which is from an IBM M50 as we have a lot lying around here at work. The good thing is that DS1 and DS0 are labeled and are turned on or off by a solder blob.

[sbeehre]

Ok here is the pic of what i did with my afore mentioned floppy drive... as you can see in the pic ive removed the solder blob on DS1 and put it on DSO then i cut the trace right by pin 34 and then soldered a wire from the ALPS-R chip to pin 2. The pin on the chip would have gone to pin 34 had i not cut the trace. Then i just connected pin 34 to 30 and its all ready to go and be an Amiga floppy drive

[TheBilgeRat]

OK so after the soldering and the hooking up I get a drive that behaves like an amiga drive but it won't boot off of DF0.  it is a jumpered drive, so I set DF0 via jumper.

Found this:

http://www.freewebs.com/computolio/amiga_floppy_compatibility.html

Basically says the drive I have (Epson SMD-340) doesn't work period...

[abbub]

Will this aforementioned PC Diskette drive mod make the drive work as a HD drive, or just a standard drive?