A1200 external 2,5" floppy problem

[Amigator]

Hi all.

I have an external 5,25" floppy drive, which is actually working fine on an A500.

BUT, when i hook it up on my A1200, it is not working.

external 3,5" drives are working fine on the A1200, so the disk drive connection should be fine too.

So, my guess is that such drives are not really compatible with the A1200,
But my question is: does anybody know any "workaround" on order to make it work on the A1200

If this should be needed. the Drive type is a Chinon FZ506.

[countzero]

what is a 2.5' floppy drive ? a new invention ?

or did you mean 5.25' floppy drive ?

[Amigator]

Uh, yes of course.

Jeez, that's a bad typo. ;-)

[Daedalus]

There's no real reason it shouldn't work, except for software differences. The floppy controller is pretty much identical in all Amigas. When you say it doesn't work, what exactly doesn't work? Do you have a mountlist for the drive? Perhaps WB1.3 on the A500 has the 5.25" drive listed in its mountfile, and 3.0 doesn't...

[Amigator]

Well, the full story then:

When i hook up the external 5.21" drive to the Amiga 500, everything is working well.
The drive reads and writes perfectly as it should.

On the A1200 (kick 3.1 / wb 3.1) the drive is recognized on boot stage. The drive starts spinning, but the head is not moving, thus the disk is not recognized.
After boot, the drive appears as DF1:
Trying to format the disk results in error message : Cannot write cylinder 0

Again, the A1200 with kick 3.1 but booted with workbench 1.3 (which is used on the a500), the same thing happens: drive spins, head does not move, disk not recognized.
After boot, drive appears as DF1:BAD
Formatting results in error message : Initialization failed, no sector header, try different disk

Yet again, the A1200, softkicked with ROM 1.3, and booted with WB1.3 -- Same result
Drive spins on boot, no head movement.
After boot, drive appears as DF1:BAD
Formatting results in error message : Initialization failed, no sector header, try different disk

Since the drive works on the A500 flawlessly, i should assume that the drive is OK
As for the A1200, i tried 4 Different motherboards, all with the same result. So i think that this cannot be the problem either.

I'm a bit of desperate, and confused.

[Drac]

Have you checked the voltage on the 1200 system.

The powersupply on the 1200 could to small or defective/unstable.

Or feed it with an external powersupply.

It's the onlything I can think of atm.

[Amigator]

Ok,

I just tried it while feeding the drive from an external power supply.

Everything is still the same.

Drive spinning when accessed, but thats it.

[Drac]

I hate to nag but , did you check the voltage on 1200 when trying to use the drive. Check if the 5 Volt drops to much when runing the drive.

Since you have tried 4 different 1200 mobo then you should check your
1200 powersupply.

[amiga92570]

did you try installing Transformer, since that is what the a1020 was used for. If you do not use Transformer software, all mounting and disk changes must be done manually. If your intention is to use drive for storage, I would get 3.5 inch drive since a1020 only holds 360k.

[Amigator]

5V line is not dropping much, so it should be ok.

But as i said, even with external power for the disk drive, it is not working.

[Amigator]

did you try installing Transformer, since that is what the a1020 was used for. If you do not use Transformer software, all mounting and disk changes must be done manually. If your intention is to use drive for storage, I would get 3.5 inch drive since a1020 only holds 360k.

No, I did not try installing transformer. It is not the a1020 I'm using. It's just an external 5.25 floppy drive, with a capacity of 880 KB. And the drive is working on an A500, without this software.

On the A500, mounting and diskchange works just fine without any additional software