replacement floppy cable

[Will-i-am]

I just realized that my box of cables is devoid of any floppy drive cables. I want to re-assemble one of my A4000 desktops but I had to borrow the floppy cable from it to use in my A4KT. I had thought that I had a spare cable. Is it possible to take any old IDE cable with the correct number of pins and all.... assuming that there are some without.... and use it in my Amiga? (Fat chance) or if not, are there some wires to swap around? How about a source for buying these cables? I might have things to trade, ie hardware, software.... 8-) I do have an external floppy but I figure that without the df0: plugged in I would have trouble booting up, nes pa? Thanks.

[itix]

Cant help with the cable but Amiga can boot without DF0...

[PaSha]

Easiest solution: Buy a bog standard PC floppy cable.
These usually have 3 connectors. The ribbon cable goes straight (as in no twists) between the first and the middle connector, and has a twist in the ribbon between the middle and the last connector.
Use the straight untwisted bit, and chop off the last connector with the twist on it.


Using an IDE cable: Possible, but because the IDE cable has got 40 pins as opposed to the floppy cable's 34 pins, 6 pins will remain unused. Most floppy drives have some spare room next to the connector where this extra bit can go, but be very careful with getting the right pins in.

A floppy drive will normally not die/explode with an incorrectly inserted cable, but simply refuse to work.


Oh, and one more thing: On the A4000D motherboard, there is a jumper, J352, that allows you to use an external drive as df0:

pins 1-2 = DF0: and DF1: internal, DF2: and DF3: external
pins 2-3 = DF1: and DF2: internal, DF0: and DF3: external

-Paul

[Will-i-am]

Paul, thanks for the jumper info. I decided to gut one of my A2000s since I have 3.... for some reason I thought the cables wouldn't be compatible but now I think that I was getting confused about DD over HD or something like that. Anyway it still won't boot, but it has begun asking me for workbench, so I probably need to take a harder look at the jumpers on the 2 hard drives, extras which may or may not be fried. Too many details to recall which parts were fried, which simply got moved out. I gotta start marking these things. If I jumper the external floppy drive to be df0: that would be good, because I need to get a clean boot in order to check the HDs, since they don't want to boot on their own... see? Kinda wish I hadn't done such a good job of dismantling the dang thing. Once I know everything works I can start deciding if the A4K goes into the antique radio case, or the A2K. Since I want to use an LCD monitor I'm gonna need a scandoubler, too, unless the Spectrum EGS card does for me... details, details...

[Argus]

If you use the floppy cable from an A2000, make sure you attach the connector w/o the twist to the high density floppy drive in the A4000.

As for booting, I recommend detaching the ide drive and seeing if you boot from floppy first.  Then add your first bootable (primary/master) ide drive...and so on.

[Will-i-am]

"If you use the floppy cable from an A2000, make sure you attach the connector w/o the twist to the high density floppy drive in the A4000."

yup, did that. Something I actually remembered from a manual or some such thing. Didn't make a difference. What I ended up with was of the 3 hard drives from previous incarnations of that machine and/or the other A4K desktop, two seem to be recognized as hard drives, although the HDTools shows them as meaningless numbers, letters and characters. That is to say all the fields on the 'read configuration' button results were nonsense. Not entirely sure what that means. I'm begining to wonder if they were formatted in the OS 3.9 machine. Would that make a difference?

I think I just have to (once again) open up the Bride of the Beast and since she boots and even the Picasso card is now working, swapping drives both hard and floppy is the most efficient means of finding out if the information on these drives can be saved or if I have to reformat and reinstall the OS,(in which case I may just install 3.0 because I believe that some of the progs that broke under 3.9 still worked under 3.0.)

But the floppy problem... changing the jumper to allow for the external floppy to be df0: worked okay. I can boot from that, but nothing so far has enabled the internal df0: to work out. dang. I have to check out that cable somehow. I just wish it was easier to open up an Amiga rather than all them little screws. I keep dropping them. Thanks for the suggestions.