A4000D Is the Floppy HD or DD? Or just jacked...

[slaapliedje]

So I happen to have another 3GB hard drive floating around, and wanted to set up and try get a 'better' Amiga setup than my current slightly broken version running OS3.9.

So I popped in a brand new floppy disk (they are getting hard to find!) and formatted it.  It initially formatted as 1760KB.  I started copying over the Emergency-Boot files, then it gave me a write error.  I tried several times to get it to write, but finally canceled.  Then tried formatting the same floppy on my PC, it worked fine.

Then I popped it back into the Amiga, tried to format it and now it would only format as 880KB.  So I popped in a different floppy, and a different... well all of them only offered to format as 880KB.

I have tried rebooting, unplugging the whole thing, etc.  Still only 880KB.  I was going to check to make sure it was clean inside, but the front of the A4000 was being a pain, so I gave up on that, booted it back up but the same thing...

Any ideas?  Does this mean my drive is going bad?  I did format as 880KB just fine, but the OS3.9 Emergency-Boot disk is larger than that.

Any help greatly appreciated.

slaapliedje

[Jeff]

It's probably the A4000's floppy drive acting up. I think there are some micro switches in the drive you can clean that might help (I am really starting to dislike floppies).

I also seem to remember that you can use more than 1 880k disk to make the E-Boot set if it won't fit, anyone?

[Tension]

Mount the RAD: device and use that instead of an actual floppy drive.

Good luck.

[slaapliedje]

Kind of what I figured.  I really dislike floppies too, never have had much luck with them.  

Any hints on getting the floppy drive out?  I made that half attempt yesterday, but didn't want to snap anything on the front.

I'm now googling for fitting it on 880KB disks though

Thanks for the really quick response!

slaapliedje

[Jeff]

You have to remove the A4000's front face first without braking anything. Make a small tool bent on the end and one-by-one unsnap the clips carefully from the inside.

[Matt_H]

You should be able to see the model of the floppy drive with the back of the case off. If it's a 357A, it's high density. If it's 354, it's double density. It could be dirty. Try a cleaning disk, or cleaning by hand once you get it out of the machine.

[slaapliedje]

It is indeed the 357A.  As I had said, it initially did show 1760KB.  I finished cleaning it out and putting it all back together (talk about a pain, needing to pop out the Radeon and Network, then Mediator, then CD-ROM, etc...)

It is now formatting at 1760KB.

Out of curiosity, I just did a google for Mounting RAD, but most people said it didn't survive a warmboot, so how exactly would I use that instead?  

slaapliedje

[Jeff]

RAD: should survive a warmboot, RAM: will not.

[Thomas]

I did format as 880KB just fine, but the OS3.9 Emergency-Boot disk is larger than that.

The emergency disk fits perfectly on a 880k floppy disk. Only if you select to copy IDEfix, too, it will try to copy all parts of IDEfix to the disk and that does not fit. Do not select IDEfix and copy atapi.device to the disk manually afterwards. That's the only file needed.

[Tension]

It is indeed the 357A.  As I had said, it initially did show 1760KB.  I finished cleaning it out and putting it all back together (talk about a pain, needing to pop out the Radeon and Network, then Mediator, then CD-ROM, etc...)

It is now formatting at 1760KB.

Out of curiosity, I just did a google for Mounting RAD, but most people said it didn't survive a warmboot, so how exactly would I use that instead?  

slaapliedje

Just type "mount rad:" in a shell window, or double click the RAD icon in dh0:storage/devs/dosdrivers

It survives a warm reset, and you can change the size of the disc by editing it's tooltype.

It's very, very, handy.