My Amiga 500 disk drive issue....

[AmigaClassicRule]

I just received my Amiga 500 power supply and it looks durable, strong and in excellent condition. As soon as I turn my Amiga 500 on...I do not hear any disk drive activity, I just see the disk drive LED activity on but no clicking, no disk drive activity. The disk drive LED activity is on for 5 seconds before it turns off...then I get the insert disk icon (I am using kickstart 1.3) and when I insert any disk into the disk drive it does not read the disk at all. No clicking from the disk drive and no activity at all from the disk drive. No matter what disk I put into the disk drive...still no activity. I do not know what to do. I do not mind replacing the disk drive with the CF version where would I find that disk drive? However, also I want to get my hands on a real disk drive because I was writing a game in Blitz Basic and I cannot have access to the content if I am using the CF disk drive emulator.....so in away I real need an actual disk drive. Does anyone have a spare Amiga 500 disk drive that is working in mint condition...or if anyone know how to solve my problem with my disk drive I will be greatly appreciate it.

[gertsy]

Do you have the ability to check the drive connectivity? Have you had the 500 for a while? Is it new? Has it worked previously?  Based on the limited info you could start by checking for a cable/pin alignment issue (AKA: Floppy data cable plugged in incorrectly)
Also once you have the case open and the floppy drive out but connected you can check if it is spinning.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

All of the above.  Make sure it's connected correctly, clean it, if it still doesn't work you should be able to find one on ebay or amibay pretty cheap.  Good luck!

[AmigaClassicRule]

OK! Before I go into purchasing new disk drive...how do I know it is not the CIA in the motherboard that is causing the problem? How do I know it is not a defect in the motherboard itself and not the disk drive?

Better yet...can I just skip all that and get ma an external disk drive and assign the DF0: into the external disk drive and just boot from the external disk drive itself?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Swap the CIA's and see if the problem changes, can't hurt anything, however it's Paula that controls the disk drive.

You can boot from an external drive just fine depending on what version of Kickstart you have (select from the Early Startup screen) however most games or software that is hard coded for df0: won't work this way.

I believe there's a few different methods of rerouting df0: logic to an external drive, hardware devices, etc. Probably still cheaper to just try with a replacement drive first.