RE: Amiga 500

Anders, Ethan, 

Thanks! So I think I will look for a known good boot disk before a replace
the drive. 

I do know that after the Amiga was pulled from storage, it loaded ran
Arkanoid once. The Arkanoid disk now has a clear (see through) circle on the
disk and wont load again. I have cleaned both heads of the floppy but it
still won't load the boot disk. 


LocalH, 

Awesome, that would be great!! So will I be able to boot from a Workbench
V1.3 disk if the Amiga 500 is looking for a Workbench V1.3 disk?


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-cbm-hackers@musoftware.de
[mailto:owner-cbm-hackers@musoftware.de] On Behalf Of Ethan Dicks
Sent: Monday, May 02, 2011 6:18 PM
To: cbm-hackers@musoftware.de
Subject: Re: Amiga 500

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Anders Carlsson <anders.carlsson@sfks.se>
wrote:
> Scott wrote:
>
>> Also, the disk drive continually runs or clicks

That's "normal" - the machine is stepping the drive to set/reset the
/DSKCHG signal when the user changes media (something that DOS PCs
don't do and don't know about).  There were a number of "no click"
hacks back in the day (which IIRC relied on the drive not stepping
below track zero, so the internal drive electronics still checked the
media-inserted switches but didn't actually move the heads).

> You should be aware that Amiga floppy drives tend to be the first item
> to break. There are a lot of Amigas out there which work except for the
> built-in floppy drive. The mechanism is the same Chinon F?-354 type as
> found in e.g. Atari ST and some other computers. Supposedly the way the
> Amiga accesses the floppy drive would shorten its life.

I've owned a lot of Amigas over the years and I don't recall a higher
floppy drive mortality rate than PC or Mac hardware of the same era,
but perhaps so few Amiga 500s had hard drives that they simply racked
up more hours on the floppy drives than other types of machines and
the drives wore out.  There's nothing intrinsically "wrong" with the
way Amigas access the floppy drive (they achieve greater storage
density by writing out whole tracks at a time vs writing out
individual sectors one by one, so they can skimp on the inter-sector
gaps enough to add up to a couple more sectors per track).

> The fact that the drive reads for a few seconds then fails tells me you
> might as well try to get another drive as another floppy disk. In theory
> I think a standard PC drive would work after a few modifications, mainly
> emulating the disk change signal but I never went through with doing it
> myself.

http://dliapp.wizhut.com/blog/?p=59
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbl/4068073847/

-ethan

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