Internal floppy drive reads but doesn't write?

[gurthuk]

My Amiga 1200 floppy drive is acting a bit strange.

I can't format disks in Workbench, they always struggle from the very start and give up early on.

I thought I'd do a Workbench backup of my original so I used X-Copy and everything went fine but when I tried to boot from the backup it failed. Checked the disk by loading from DH0: and it say's the disk it's a NONDOS.

Reading is fine.

1) Does this kind of behaviour sound plausible - Read OK, write fail?
2) Can I take the drive from an A500 and put it in my A1200 - straight swap?

[motorollin]

gurthuk wrote:
1) Does this kind of behaviour sound plausible - Read OK, write fail?

The write head could be mucky so it goes through the motions of writing, but nothing is actually changed on the disk (or what it writes is corrupted). You could dismantle the drive and clean it manually, or try one of those floppy drive cleaning disks.

gurthuk wrote:
2) Can I take the drive from an A500 and put it in my A1200 - straight swap?

Yes, but I don't think it will fit properly in the A1200's casing. Amigakit sell replacement drives if you want to replace it.

--
moto

[Gavilan]

@gurthuk: DHO? Sure? I guess DHO is primary partition on HDD!!

You mean DF0 maybe?

Check what moto told you (Hello moto!!!). also, another (cheaper) option, if you are good soldering is to get a cheap PC floppy drive and do a hack to "convert it" to Amiga.
Its very easy to do.
I can give you lot of info, even if its not written in english you will understand it quite easily.

Let me know if i can help you

Cheers!

Sebastian

[CLS2086]

Hi,
if you write but can't read it, it may be :
head a bit out of alignement
head too used to write properly
circuits starting to fail (CMS capacitors...)

[gurthuk]

Correct DH0: - I booted from my hard drive and then inserted the disk but it came up as NONDOS. My poorly written sentence sorry.

I'll swap the drive over with the A500 to rule A1200 drive in or out.

If the drive is faulty and I do decide to replace it with a PC clone are there any associated problems? I seem to remember reading that this can cause problems when booting some games from disk.

[Gavilan]

I can assure you that in our Amiga Club in Argentina, one of our "magicians" has arrived to a solution that is 100% compatible with Amiga

You can try it for yourself! In the worst scenario you will only loose a Pc floppy drive! And you can even try it on a used floppy drive, you dont need to buy one!

since we live in a country far far away from most of where all active Amiga scene is, and since it was impossible to find parts and replacements for all our dead amiga floppy drives, we found this solution (well actually my friend did), and now, almost all amiga useres in Argentina are very happy, using his method, which seems to be the perfect solution...

At least my own experience, i have been using one of his modified Pc floppy drives for over a year, and still didnt have a single issue with it

Cheers

Sebastian

[gurthuk]

I'll be interested in this yes please.

[DinGBaT]

i would love to get hold of that pc floppy conversion  i even grabed one of those adaptors from ebay  that amiga tech make but even has loading probs..

[Gavilan]

Ok guys. Since the document is written in spanish and hosted in the Amiga forum in Argentina, i will translate it to the best english i can, and will post it here, along with some schematics and pics

Please, allow me 1 or 2 days to do the task

I hope this helps a lot of Amiga users all over the world

Kind Regards
Sebastian

[gurthuk]

Bought a floppy drive cleaning kit and that has done the trick - back now working.