A1200 drive issues

[mps42]

 A very good friend of mine has an A1200 for years and recently has stopped booting from either a floppy or hard disk. From his descriptions, he gets the "insert disk" screen and that's it.
 I suspect a failure in the drive controller, which (AFAIK) is an on-board chip, but am not sure how I would test this theory without having another 1200 available.
 Any assistance appreciated.

[TjLaZer]

This is not a Soyo motherboard.  Most likely it is the Hard Disc that has stopped working!  Open it up, remove the HD and install another industry standard PC 2.5" IDE HD (Smaller the better, but any will do) and run HDToolBox or HDInstTools and prep it.  It should work again.  

NOTE: Keep in mind to keep the drive's partitions under 4GB unless you use OS 3.5+ or special software, or the master boot record will get wiped out losing all data!

I recently added a IBM Travelstar 4.86GB HD to my A600, I had to omit the .86MB off the drive to only use 4GB total.  Works fine.

As far as the floppy drive, you can try cleaning the drive heads to see if that helps, otherwise get another Amiga drive and swap it out.  But on this one the Amiga needs a special drive or a modified PC drive to work.