External floppy drive issues

[chris-red]

I got a floppy drive off of the bay and it doesn't seem to work properly Amiga recognises but disks that boot fine the the main drive won't boot on the external. When I copy on the fly using x copy the disk doesn't seem to work despite the copy completing successfully.

How do I go about trouble shooting this?

The drive has a switch on the back but no brand name on the outside, under the casing it says NEC.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by chris-red

I got a floppy drive off of the bay and it doesn't seem to work properly Amiga recognises but disks that boot fine the the main drive won't boot on the external. When I copy on the fly using x copy the disk doesn't seem to work despite the copy completing successfully.

Many non-dos disks (e.g. many games) cannot boot properly in any external drives as they are hardcoded to run from df0:.
Have you tried doing verify when copying a disk?

[A500Man]

Hi,

just a thought: Maybe your power-supply is too weak. I have seen a normal Amiga 500 with just a ram-ex installed where the external floppy-drive was not properly recognized. The power supply was a 2,5A one. Changed against an 3A type and the floppy worked.

Could - of course - also be the drive itself; dirty or disarranged read/write-head ... Have a glance inside to check for dustballs or defectice read/write-head.

And: Booting from the external drive is not standard! To boot from DF1: you have to have at least Kickstart-ROM version 2.04; klick BOTH mouse-buttons when switching on the Amiga There a grey screen with a choice of boot-drives comes up. At Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 you can not boot a game from the external floppy without the help of additional soft- or hardware (Bootselector).

CU,
A500Man