A1200/A4000 Floppy drive issues

Hi all,

I'm having some rather bizarre floppy drive problems, and I can't seem to find the root cause.

I'm using three different Amigas:
1. Commodore A1200 with Blizzard A1260, 64 MB fastmem, KS 3.1, OS 3.9 + BoingBags, Indivision AGA MkII. 32 GB SSD on standard IDE bus.
2. A4000/030 upgraded with A3640, 16 MB fastmem, KS 3.1, OS 3.9 + BoingBags, Indivision AGA MkI. 16 GB CF card on standard IDE bus.
3. Commodore A1200 with ACA 1230/56 MHz, 64 MB fastmem, KS 3.1, OS 3.9 + BoingBags (cloned using dd from A1200 number 1). 16 GB SSD on standard IDE bus.

Now the trouble is that systems 1 and 2 will not read floppies. System 2 had this problem when I got it, so I sent it out to Amiga Center a few years ago to get the motherboard checked (and also to have some chips socketed, battery replaced etc.). It came back serviced and tested, but still will not read disks. Oh well, I thought, the 1.76 MB floppy drives are a pain anyway.

However, this is new for system 1. I even tried with an external drive, and the behaviour is exactly the same: the drive spins up, makes two audible clicks, and then tells me DF0: (or DF1 is "Unreadable".

The machine setups are very vanilla. I put in a clean install of OS3.9, installed the boingbags, MUI, and did not do much else. It seems very strange that system 3 reads disks nicely despite having almost exactly the same setup (indeed, the very same WB partition).

Do you have any pointers as to what could be causing this? A working floppy drive is not life and death, of course, but once a year you do run into a scenario where it should work. I would be tempted to suspect that the Indivisions have something to do with this, but the A4000 did not read disks even before I installed one.

[hese]

I assume you mean the internal drives of systems 1 and 2 do not read floppies but the internal drive of system 3 does.
Does the external drive work on any of the systems?

Usually this kind of failure is due to dried electrolytic capacitors of the floppy drive or dirty drive heads.
Drive heads can be cleaned for example with a cotton swab and isopropyl alcohol.

Thanks, hese. Motivated by your post, I actually dug up another external drive and formatted a disk on system 3 with it. It seems to work with system 1. The external drive I tested worked when I put it into the cupboard, but that may have been some years ago... I'll have a look at the internal drive of system 1 first and see if there's something I can clean or replace.

I replaced the electrolytic capacitors and cleaned the drive heads, same result. Also tried another spare drive I had, no difference. As I don't feel like disassembling the only working system I have, I ordered a spare drive from Amigakit and will go from there.

[bdb]

Have you aligned the drive? There is a program and instructions on Aminet.

Have not, however I would think that if a drive is not aligned it creates sporadic errors instead of failing completely. I cannot get them to recognise any disks at all, and they will not format past track 0. I'll look into that just in case.

[bdb]

Actually even a half track off will cause a complete fail

OK, I'll try that this week. Thanks.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by bdb

Actually even a half track off will cause a complete fail

It should still be able to read disks it wrote..