Dying Classic Floppy drives

[Jeff]

I haven't seen any updates to the floppy drive replacement project in a while. It sure looks like a much needed development. In the mean while as all of our floppy drives are getting sick and dying... :-)

One of my A4000T's has this device attached to the back of a Sony PC floppy drive and it works quite well.
http://amigahardware.mariomisic.de/cgi-bin/showhardware_en.cgi?HARDID=381

The floppy drives still seem to be around too. Granted these are black;
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=018&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&viewitem=&item=280116208705&rd=1&rd=1

but I think they would still work if we could replicate the small circuit board. It seems to have 1 PAL. How hard would it be to make a dozen or so of these?  Would it even be worth the trouble?

Thanks,
Jeff

[X-ray]

Jeff I would go for that, if someone made the converter. Unfortunately I have had the worst luck with floppy drives. This includes two drives I bought brand new in 1996 (that didn't work) and also two purchases I made here on Amiga.org where I did not get the drives in the mail. So yes, those converters would be good. Can they not be used on a standard PC drive? Have you tried it?

[Jeff]

My A4000T came with that model Sony HD drive installed with the little converter on the back and it works great. It looks like a standard drive that is still available. I could probably make the little board with Eagle or something, but I have never actually done it. Someone that has made PC boards before could probably do this in no time, and there are companies online that you just email the .brd file to.

As far as duplicating the PAL IC, for all I know this could range from simple to impossible. Again someone will know:-)

Either that, or we need a device that will replace the floppy with an SD card, or perhaps a modification to the Kickstart ROM so the machine will boot to something other than a floppy drive at DFX:
 

[amigadave]

Catweazle

 :-D

[amigadave]

Actually, I think it is Catweasle.  

I should know because I have three of them.  One in my towerized A4000D, and two in PC's.  All are different models, but all work great.

And, as far as I know the drivers are still being improved and developed.

Check it out!

[X-ray]

But can you boot a nondos disk with a Catweasel?

[Jeff]

The only currently available Catweasel is a $110.00 PCI card unless I am missing something. None of my classic machines have a PCI slot, at least not yet.

What I was looking for is an inexpensive readily available solution for replacing floppy drives on classic machines, not all of which even have Zorro slots.

[orange]

 :roll:  :roll:  :roll:  :roll:  :roll:

link

pinout

[_ThEcRoW]

Actually there is too the catweasel anniversary edition that works fitting it on the a1200 clockport. The thing i don't know is if you will be allowed to boot ndos disks with it.

[Stedy]

With some external drives, you can just open them up and plug in a new PC floppy drive.

I did this with an old Amitek External disk drive, just made sure the new drive had the 34 way connector on the correct side.

What made the task easy was a small PCB with a 16V8 PAL that dealt with the interfacing between Amiga and PC drive. I have made an image of this PAL but it will not transfer to newer PALs (and the 16V8 is near obsolete).

There are schematics that show how to interface a PC floppy to an Amiga, last one I tried would not boot all disks. Now I have a logic analyser, one day I may fix it.

Ian

[Jeff]

The small PCB with the PAL was exactly what I was thinking about trying to replicate. This seems to allow certain HD floppies to work in HD mode.

This site has plans for a simpler version (DD Only I'm sure), and even seems to sell the ready made boards. Perhaps I'll just try that instead.

http://www.amigasc.nm.ru/english/download.html

If you can't copy that PAL with your correct equipment and experience I won't even try:-D

Thanks to everyone for all of the ideas.

[Stedy]

Jeff,

The Floppy PCB interface and the ATX PSU adaptor on the site you linked to came from my website originally!

I did build the floppy interface on a breadboard once, it mostly worked but had issues with diskchanges. Never got around to investigating it.

Would there be interest in adaptor boards like this?

[X-ray]

Yes, I'll buy three. All I want is to attach it to an ordinary PC drive, and be able to boot nondos disks. If it can read and write High Density disks that's a bonus but not essential.

orange wrote:
 :roll:  :roll:  :roll:  :roll:  :roll:

link

pinout

This trick works fine as long as you don't care for HD floppies.

It also works to fix damaged Commodore 1581 drives.

[amesie2]

I have 2 4000T's that have the MPF920-E Sony floppy in them, I recently aquired some old PC's and one of them had a MPF920-E so I hooked it up to the 4000T and it wouldn't work. I looked closer at the drive and found a jumper by the power connector I think it was, a very small one that had to be changed to match the ones in my current drive in the 4000T. I did have to loosen the top cover of the drive to get access to it. I don't recall the exact settings at the moment just that I did change it to match and then the drive worked. The other thing that both towers have in common is that the floppy cable was modified in that it looked similar to the first link eslapion put up with the exception of the diode. This trick only allows for DD operation even tho the drives are HD. I also have one of the adapters (357) in a 4000 Mirage Pro tower from the second link eslapion put up but I am not certain of the type drive since I didn't look that close at it. I do like the idea of producing a board or adapter to hook onto the drive rather than hacking a cable to make it work. I am guessing that this is how Amiga Tech. did things was to come up with a cheap fix to get a drive working in the later 4000T's.