Trying to identify which A2000 Version I just got

[mrnukem]

I have the worst luck. Got home today to find that it now gives me disk read errors on any disks I put in. I had left it on with a demo running and on reboot it trys to read the disks  but gives a read/write error on known good disks that worked on it as of yesterday. Guy sold it as-is on e-bay but said floppy disk worked. Neither of the 2 drives it it work so I think the issue is the controller chip and heat. I was all stoked and excited too and now I am out $90 total.

Baby Jesus hates me...

[1NOM155]

Clean it, and have a check on CIA chips.
Check too the jumper J301:

This jumper is closed to add a second internal floppy drive, open to leave the second floppy out of the main unit box. The Amiga expects an ID bit stream from each floppy drive; this lets it determine the drive type. External floppies have this ID circuitry on board, but as it's not an industry standard capability, it has to be implemented on the A2000 motherboard to save cost on internal drives. Leaving the jumper open prevents the Amiga from seeing the ID sequence.

If its necessary, you can buy here.

[mrnukem]

I checked the jumper. Also tried to use the internal drive 2 as the main floppy drive but it would not recognize any disks. (I removed the Jumper 301 when setting the Amiga as a single drive system) From research I found that I can not just pop a PC floppy drive in as a test drive so I took an Amiga 1010 external floppy drive I had our of the case and tried to set that as drive 0 as a replacement and it also did not recognize any disks. I cleaned the drive as well and made sure all the chips on the mother board were not flexing out of socket.

Is there a way to force the Amiga to boot off an external floppy drive? I have 2 that I know were working on my Amiga 1000 and if I can get the system running that way it would be a workable solution. I was hoping to get a hard drive for this system but this really has stopped me out of the gate so to speak.

Thanks for the tips and advise.

[TjLaZer]

Get a disk drive cleaning kit and clean the drive heads.  Mine do the same thing, all disks all of a sudden dont work or have read/write errors.  Once I clean the drive they all work ok.  Where in WA are you?

[mrnukem]

I am in South West Washington. I had used some canned air on the drives but will go in with some swabs and try to do a deeper cleaning.

I feel silly because I was all excited about my new system and now I am just bummed out.

Thanks will let everyone know what happens. Any more tip or tricks to try?

[Ellis]

You have a A1000 and seem to be well versed on amiga. Floppy drives on anything don't work well; amiga or PC. Of course floppies work much better on amiga's. The floppy drives on amiga's actually cost more than a dollar, but very old!
Since, you say they worked yesterday I guess you might have some kind of drive or controller problem. Clean the drive and I would even say have a computer tech ie.. amiga tech (good luck finding one)do the cleaning. You have two amiga's you could trouble shoot the drives and floppies on each system. If it does work on the A1000 then you know you have some issues.

Floppy disk go bad a lot more often then the disk drives do  ,but both have problems often.I have a A2000 mobo that I might be getting rid of and it has a 2091 scsi controller. You could just buy the 2091 from me if you like.PM me if interested.       :-D  :-D  :-D  :-D

[Zac67]

Don't forget to reseat the Paula chip in addition to the CIAs - might just be a bad contact in the analogue circuitry.

[mrnukem]

Is there a Way to for the Amiga to boot off an external floppy drive? Any key combinations at boot up to make it boot from an external drive? I had disconnected the internal drives but no boot from external discs.

Whats odd is both the floppy drives are Chinon brand and have the exact same model number but drive 0 has 2 rows of 4 jumper blocks and drive 1 has 1 row of 4.

Thanks again for all the help

[Zac67]

Not with a 1.3 ROM - AFAIR Kick 2.0+ boots from any floppy, but currently I've only got one drive and can't test it.

[orange]

there are small utilities that allow booting from df1:
they are resident and can survive some resets, they usually have a virus checker, floppy formatter, fastmem off, and similar goodies.

I remember cool one that would turn 'hand holding diskette' into red.

BTW, what would be best and worst A2000 motherboard version for expansions?
(is it safe to assume that newer version are always better?)