Can anyone identify this floppy drive?

[Oli_hd]

Hi,
I hope someone is able to help, a guy was clearing out his house and found an A500 user manual and this floppy drive which he claims is an Amiga floppy drive.. its even by Power Computing, a well known UK Amiga company who did floppy drives .. but its got two 25 pin D-Sub connectors.

So is it an Amiga drive? Anyone have one?
Any info would be great as I would love a 5 1/4" floppy drive on my a4K

Here are a few pics:




Inside its got a small circuit board with the two 25 pin connectors basically wired together, two logic chips (a 4040 and something else) and two connections for the two floppy drives.
The drives are a 720kb (100% Amiga compatible) NEC drive and a 1.2Meg 5.25 drive.
there is also a transformer, diodes, capacitors, regulators etc to power the two drives.

The floppy signals seem to just connect to the interface which makes me think parallel but why have a pass-through which I cant see working on parallel...

come on guys, show your wisdom  :-D

[motorollin]

Weren't Amiga external floppy drives 25 pin? Maybe one port is for a cable to connect it to another Amiga, and the other is the passthrough which allowed you to daisy chain another external floppy drive.

--
moto

[Oli_hd]

Weren't Amiga external floppy drives 25 pin?

Nope Motorollin, they are 23pin female at the computer.

Maybe one port is for a cable to connect it to another Amiga, and the other is the passthrough which allowed you to daisy chain another external floppy drive.

I did think maybe they couldnt get 23pin pcb mount connectors so used 25 and had a lead with a 23 pin plug one end and a 25 pin plug the other... but that wouldnt be very cost effective.

It is an option though, I could make up a cable and try.. see if I get smoke or not.

[amiga92570]

I had a drive that looked like this one years ago for my tandy laptop.  :-o

[Oli_hd]

I had a drive that looked like this one years ago for my tandy laptop.

I would say this weighed about five kilos, god help you if you had this on a laptop

[motorollin]

Ahh yes of course, 23pin for floppy drive. Is the Power Computing logo definitely the Amiga Power Computing? The logo looks different to me. There was also a company called Power Computing who made Apple-compatible equipment. Could it be made by them?

--
moto

[amiga92570]

well it stayed on the desk at the office with the eprom burner, and printer. That was back when the laptops didn't have hard drives.

[DrDekker]

I'm with Motorollin in thinking it's not the Power Computing we all know (and love).  The logo was a sketchy figure of a bloke throwing a lightning bolt or something.

It could be that a shortage of 23-pin connectors has led to the use of 25-pin jobbies.  Then again, it could be that the drive really does use the parallel port.  The pass through connector would allow the use of a second drive perhaps - or even a printer.  I've still got a monochrome hand scanner (real Power Computing) that has such a through-port.

[Nostalgiac]

well it's not a Mac external drive - those where 19 pins.

very weird - not seen this before
Tom UK

[Zac67]

I think Moto's right - some laptops had external drives that connected to the printer port. I've got an old Omnibook 6000 that works like that.

Dunno about 5 1/4" drives on the Amiga, but 3,5" ones are all host powered and it looks like that combo has a fuse on the back. Is that an external power cord or the D-Sub cable? If that's a power cord, one port connects to the PC's printer port, the other to the printer - no way this is an Amiga drive.

I dimly remember that Schneider/Amstrad computers sometimes had external drives that were pretty much set up like that.

Ah yes: you can open the 3,5" drive's front lid a bit: if there are two sensors on the right side, it's a HD floppy.

[RW222]

I've got a PC external drive somewhere that plugs into the PC parallel port. Mine's a RadioShack/Tandy model. Mine's a 5.25 and I picked up a bundle of 5.25 1.2MB media, and made a set of slackware install disks, thinking I could use it to put slack on a 486 lappy with a fried internal drive... I then realised, that slackware couldn't be persuaded to read the drive, doh, only had a dos driver for it. HDD was too small to load it up with images then install. Some of the smaller subnotebooks had hardware and BIOS support for a parallel port floppy. Some early 386 era ones had support for them as a B drive, at that time 1.44 was mostly confined to PS/2 machine and a lot of software came on 1.2MB (that period didn't last very long, if you blinked you missed it)

Anyhoo, could quite possibly be a PC drive. Though you'd expect in that case to see some buffers and a PC floppy controller chip in there somewhere.

There is a slight chance it's SCSI, but then it should have a jumper block or hex wheel switch on the back for the ID, unless it was hard set. Also it would likely have a z80 and a floppy controller chip inside. These were mostly used on VMS and Unix hardware.

[Oli_hd]

Hi guys, thanks for all the replies!

Anyhoo, could quite possibly be a PC drive. Though you'd expect in that case to see some buffers and a PC floppy controller chip in there somewhere.

Nope, no buffers or floppy controller on the board, just a 74hc74 and the 4040.

Heres a last ditch effort, three more photos:

Power computing logo... doesnt look much like "our" power computing so I guess your right, could be a PC company one I guess.


Just a pic with the top off, not much to see tbh.


The main board that the drive interfaces connect to.

And the floppy drives are a Mitsubishi MF504B (A 1.2Meg 5.25" drive) and a FD1036 full height 3.5" "720k" floppy drive that google says will work on the miggy just fine, unaltered.
So at the very least I have a nice a2000 floppy out of it ;-)

[amiga92570]

yeah, almost just like the one I had on a tandy laptop in about 1989. The old laptops had a 25 pin floppy expansion port.

[Delta]

Just a hunch...since they are identified as "A" and "B" could mean it was used with an old kind of IBM-PC compatible?

Amiga hardware would have been proudly identified as "0" and "1"

[RW222]

Another thought...

Once upon a time...

In a galaxy far, far away...

I used to have a 4 drive floppy and tape controller for an XT (8 bit) that had a high density onboard BIOS, and enough jumpers to shred the fingers of even a well practiced steel string guitarist. THAT had an external drive connector, but I don't remember now what the heck that looked like.

If it goes to a PC floppy controller though, the drive IDs should both be set to 1 and the cable twisted (to swap the ID lines and motor enable signals) ... another broken "standard".