Need Guidance Now!!!

17 December 2002, 20:21

My mates just brought over a A600HD he got off his dad. Its got a working A601 RAM expansion and a currently unworking hard drive but this is all irrelevant. I tested his Workbench disk in my A600 first so I'd be able to tell if it was working before trying to boot his machine with it. However my disks drive made some real bad noises and now it won't load any of my disks! They all come up as Non-Dos when I try to load them. My guess is the dodgy WB disk f*ck*d my read/write heads in the floppy drive. I've opened it up and its definately cacking up trying to read the disks. The bottom head has a browny/black spot on it but for all I know thats been there all along and I can't see the top head proper.
Any ideas? Is there some way I can tell for sure the problem and maybe something I can use to clean my r/w heads? I can't bear the thought of no Amiga over my Christmas Holidays, I've been looking forward to having time for it and now it might be screwed. Help me please even if you can only tell me its f*ck*d.

th4t1guy · 17 December 2002, 20:47

You can buy a 3.5" floppy disk cleaner, however, they are hard to find nowadays. Also, I'm not sure how well they actually work. One thing you could try is to open your drive up, and take a cutip soaked in rubbing alchohol to the heads.

You'll also want to look for any strands of hair. The biggest problem I have had with disk failure is a strand of hair would get caught underneath the metal plate of the disk and throw everything off.

Other than that, all I can say is maybe you need to get a new drive. I've heard that it is possible to modify a PC floppy drive to read Amiga disks, so if you need a cheap solution, take a look on the Aminet under /hard/hack/

Good luck!

17 December 2002, 20:55

I've found a really old cleaning disk from back in them miggy days! Maybe there is hope.....

Overdoc · 17 December 2002, 22:27

Do you have an external drive, too ?
In this cse you could first do the following:

Hold both Amiga mouse buttons on reset and then select DF1 as boot-up drive.
Now insert X-Copy into DF1 and let it boot from there.
In X-Copy select the option 'checkdisk' and put a know good Amiga formatted disk in the bad DF0 drive.
After clicking start X-Copy will check the disk in DF0.
If you discover that only the tracks on the lower side can be read and the ones on the upper side all give you red numbers, then the disk misaligned the upper head of your drive.
This has happened to me some times already (it happens, but I have no idea how and why ??? )
Please tell me what the X-Copy test brings up, and I might be able to help you.

17 December 2002, 23:07

Well Overdoc, I have the latest version of X-Copy (I think) called 'The Next Generation' which is v9.94. However I am currenty without an external disk drive. I'll be stuck with my dodgy drive for a while now cos I doubt I could get a replacement before Christmas, and I haven't got the money anyway. If I can get my hands on an external drive I'll try the test. I think I might have another way of performing this test though, with a little help from you guys.
My mate felt a bit guilty I think and has let me borrow his A600HD for a few days

. I'm currently in the middle of swapping my internal disk drive for his, to check for sure its my drive thats knackered. By pure fluke I've done something to get his HD working so....
Could I put X-Copy on his HD, temporarily put my floppy drive in his machine, and then run X-Copy off the HD to test the drive. This is the first time I've had an Amiga Hard-drive to play with so I don't know nothing. All I need is for you to tell me how to get X-Copy on his HD, if it is possible. Or maybe i could copy the files into RAM, both the A600s at my disposale have 2Mb.
Any ideas are appreciated. I've alredy tried my disk cleaner, and even opened it up and applied some of the fluid manually via toilet paper (probably not a good idea, but I was desperate).

Miggy2TheMax · 18 December 2002, 01:44

Quote:

Originally posted by NytroX86
I've found a really old cleaning disk from back in them miggy days! Maybe there is hope.....

The metho would have evaporated by then, try to put get some metho and put some on the medium. While putting metho on the medium turn it. Run thru your drive for about a minute. Give it 5minutes for the metho to evaporate from the heads then try reading a floppy.

18 December 2002, 09:30

Quote:

The metho would have evaporated by then

I'll try what you (and Th4t1guy) have suggested, but whatever was in the bottle of cleaning fluid seems alright to me. It stunk pretty strong so I'd say its quite well preserved. The cleaning disk is like a normal floppy withoout the metal sheath, so you can put the cleaner on the cleaning disc inside.
The more I look at my mates Amiga the more I am tempted to thieve its parts

. It has a better Kickstart (.350 to my .300), an official A601 RAM expansion in a metal case, a Chinon disk drive and a hard-drive with WB already installed.

ElectroBlaster · 18 December 2002, 20:04

M8! got any of those cotton bud/ear cleaner stick thingies? if you have use one with a bit of cleaning fluid on it and clean each head carefully until its clean! it sounds like that wb2 disk you used was rotten... floppys have a tendancy to mould over time if they arent kept properly so when you slap em in a drive! the heads get clogged with shit!

18 December 2002, 21:01

Today was my last day at college, so I'll try out the cotton bud cleaning with meths and/or my cleaner (not at the same time obviously). Since this is kind of about my mates Amiga as well and the thread name isn't really limiting, I thought I'd ask something about his HD here.
When I first switch it on it won't load and goes to the floppy startup screen. After a reset the HD just clicks and the light shows almost constant activity, and the only way to get the machine to check the floppy again is to turn the miggy off and on. However after playing Ruff 'n' Tumble for half an hour I took the disk out, reset the machine and the HD loaded. It loaded fine from then on.
Its been off for an hour or so now so I tried it again. The HD won't load again, and I'm now quite sure why it didn't. I believe the HD works once the miggy and it have heated up a bit. Thats the only way I can explain it working after the machines been in some use. I don't think it can be a simple matter of sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't, it definately starts working after the Amigas been used for a while.
Could my heat theory be correct?

ElectroBlaster · 18 December 2002, 22:11

AH right this hard drive problem sounds like the drive is:

1. Too slow to spin up in which case the amiga wont see it and thats why you get the disk loading screen! turn the amiga on from cold and then reset it... if it loads the hard drive then you know its fine... amiga's are so quick some old drives couldnt keep up lol! *I always thought this problem was only limited to the a1200 but i could be wrong!

2. The drive could be faulty or have a faulty cable.... god forbid it could be a faulty ide controller but i doubt it!

18 December 2002, 23:27

Quote:

Too slow to spin up in

Thats probably it. That would explain why it starts working after being on for a while, it takes that loong to get up to speed then the miggy can see it when I reset. I'll have to experiment to see how long it takes before it starts working. Cheers dude, and every1 for te suggestions for my floppy drive. I'll tell you if I manage to get it working again.

ElectroBlaster · 18 December 2002, 23:29

good luck m8

ive seen nearly every possible problem with amiga's lol! ive had so many of em...

18 December 2002, 23:32

I thought I might as well ask this as part of this thread. How do I transfer the contents of a floppy to a hard drive? I tried dragging and dropping my X-Copy so I could try and test my floppy drive but I got an error message every time and Workbench then freezes. I don't even knows if it would load, but I'm curious how to move files without an installer now. It must be possible, for if you wanted to backup work to a HD.

Overdoc · 19 December 2002, 01:31

Well, if you get X-Copy working via HD then that would be a great thing since it could tell you what's wrong !

But be careful: Forget the idea of loading X-Copy into Ram with the good drive, then change it to the broken one while the A-600 is running or somewthing alike ! This can kill your CIA, which means death fo the motherboard unless you have some SMD soldering skills !
Remember: NEVER plug anything on or off while the machine is running !!

Just one question: Does the drive start spinning when you insert a disk ? If you are not sure then look into the drive from the slot side, and push down the small pin you will see on the far left side of th slot. Then the spindle motor should start spinning.
Btw. what's the exact name and type number of your broken drive ? Is it a Chinon ? Or a Panasonic/Matsushita, Teac, Epson,.... ?

19 December 2002, 12:55

Last Night after I'd made that final post about file transferring I went up and gave my floppy drive a clean with my special fluid on a cotton bud. While I was at it I started thinking about the alignment of the upper head so I tried to check it. It definately wasn't in line with the lower head, it was a millimetre or so out. Also the top head would not go down straight but would slant a bit, which must be on purpose cos there is a bit of plastic keeping one side from going down to far, which I can tell has been like that forever cos its rubbed away the metal underneath it. Anyway I left the slant but tried to line the top head up better.
I then left the Amiga and floppy drive 'open' and tried loading a disk (its quite annoying trying to put a disk in when the drive aint screwed down). It was my WB backup disk which I knew worked on my friends A600HD. My miggy treated it like a blank disk. I decided I'd try an original disk, so I picked a game of his which I had seen working 'Myth'. I was quite suprised when it actually loaded the disk

. I played the game for a minute or two then tried to load my backup WB disk again. It worked and me miggy has been loading disks ever since, I just checked again.
I'll check if it can write later today, but for now I don't know what it was exactly that fixed it, but thanks to all who have answered this thread for your help

.

@Overdoc
I'm sure you would kill me if you saw the way I handled my drive when cleaning it, or for leaving the keyboard loose and drive open and switching it on, but I would never unplug a device while its on! Except mice and controllers. I was gonna put X-Copy on his HD, then turn his miggy off and perform the drive swap, then turn it back on and hope it booted from the HD. Although I don't think you''ll need to know now, my fdd is a Panasonic model, I check the number next time I open the miggy up. Its quite quiet when operating if that helps.

Overdoc · 20 December 2002, 02:56

Well, congratulations !
You have been lucky, because the upper head is rather easy to align ( can be done just by eye measure, like I also do that ), while the lower one ( that means both, because the upper is fixed to the lower one ) is much more difficult !
I suspected the upper head, because in the few cases where a bad disk killed my drive it also always was the upper head which got out of alignment. I think this comes from sticky disks which take the head with them when rotating and therefore can draw the upper head to the side a ittle bit.

When you can load X-Copy now you can do the checkdisk trick to be sure the heds are in optimal alignment and all tracks on both sides can be read at first time. Also check lower and upper head separately or some single tracks above 70.

Btw., turning the Amiga on without keyboard is no problem. Also a missing drive shouldn't hurt anything

Now enjoy the second life of your reanimated A-600 over X-mas

ElectroBlaster · 20 December 2002, 03:52

thats a small bit of info thats been learned! next time it happens or your offered an amiga with a suspect drive you will know what to look at first

Amiga1992 · 20 December 2002, 04:37

The girlfriend of RE-ANIMATOR!

ElectroBlaster · 20 December 2002, 04:44

LOL

ant512 · 21 December 2002, 00:30

Quote:

Originally posted by NytroX86
I would never unplug a device while its on! Except mice and controllers.

That can also kill your CIA chips.

17 December 2002, 20:21	#1
NytroX86 Posts: n/a	Need Guidance Now!!! My mates just brought over a A600HD he got off his dad. Its got a working A601 RAM expansion and a currently unworking hard drive but this is all irrelevant. I tested his Workbench disk in my A600 first so I'd be able to tell if it was working before trying to boot his machine with it. However my disks drive made some real bad noises and now it won't load any of my disks! They all come up as Non-Dos when I try to load them. My guess is the dodgy WB disk fckd my read/write heads in the floppy drive. I've opened it up and its definately cacking up trying to read the disks. The bottom head has a browny/black spot on it but for all I know thats been there all along and I can't see the top head proper. Any ideas? Is there some way I can tell for sure the problem and maybe something I can use to clean my r/w heads? I can't bear the thought of no Amiga over my Christmas Holidays, I've been looking forward to having time for it and now it might be screwed. Help me please even if you can only tell me its fckd.

19 December 2002, 12:55	#15
NytroX86 Posts: n/a	EAB Rules!!! Last Night after I'd made that final post about file transferring I went up and gave my floppy drive a clean with my special fluid on a cotton bud. While I was at it I started thinking about the alignment of the upper head so I tried to check it. It definately wasn't in line with the lower head, it was a millimetre or so out. Also the top head would not go down straight but would slant a bit, which must be on purpose cos there is a bit of plastic keeping one side from going down to far, which I can tell has been like that forever cos its rubbed away the metal underneath it. Anyway I left the slant but tried to line the top head up better. I then left the Amiga and floppy drive 'open' and tried loading a disk (its quite annoying trying to put a disk in when the drive aint screwed down). It was my WB backup disk which I knew worked on my friends A600HD. My miggy treated it like a blank disk. I decided I'd try an original disk, so I picked a game of his which I had seen working 'Myth'. I was quite suprised when it actually loaded the disk . I played the game for a minute or two then tried to load my backup WB disk again. It worked and me miggy has been loading disks ever since, I just checked again. I'll check if it can write later today, but for now I don't know what it was exactly that fixed it, but thanks to all who have answered this thread for your help . @Overdoc I'm sure you would kill me if you saw the way I handled my drive when cleaning it, or for leaving the keyboard loose and drive open and switching it on, but I would never unplug a device while its on! Except mice and controllers. I was gonna put X-Copy on his HD, then turn his miggy off and perform the drive swap, then turn it back on and hope it booted from the HD. Although I don't think you''ll need to know now, my fdd is a Panasonic model, I check the number next time I open the miggy up. Its quite quiet when operating if that helps.

17 December 2002, 20:47	#2
th4t1guy Registered User Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Kansas City, MO, USA Posts: 683	You can buy a 3.5" floppy disk cleaner, however, they are hard to find nowadays. Also, I'm not sure how well they actually work. One thing you could try is to open your drive up, and take a cutip soaked in rubbing alchohol to the heads. You'll also want to look for any strands of hair. The biggest problem I have had with disk failure is a strand of hair would get caught underneath the metal plate of the disk and throw everything off. Other than that, all I can say is maybe you need to get a new drive. I've heard that it is possible to modify a PC floppy drive to read Amiga disks, so if you need a cheap solution, take a look on the Aminet under /hard/hack/ Good luck!

17 December 2002, 20:55	#3
NytroX86 Posts: n/a	I've found a really old cleaning disk from back in them miggy days! Maybe there is hope.....

17 December 2002, 22:27	#4
Overdoc Commodore Collector Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Austria Age: 53 Posts: 944	Do you have an external drive, too ? In this cse you could first do the following: Hold both Amiga mouse buttons on reset and then select DF1 as boot-up drive. Now insert X-Copy into DF1 and let it boot from there. In X-Copy select the option 'checkdisk' and put a know good Amiga formatted disk in the bad DF0 drive. After clicking start X-Copy will check the disk in DF0. If you discover that only the tracks on the lower side can be read and the ones on the upper side all give you red numbers, then the disk misaligned the upper head of your drive. This has happened to me some times already (it happens, but I have no idea how and why ??? ) Please tell me what the X-Copy test brings up, and I might be able to help you.

17 December 2002, 23:07	#5
NytroX86 Posts: n/a	Well Overdoc, I have the latest version of X-Copy (I think) called 'The Next Generation' which is v9.94. However I am currenty without an external disk drive. I'll be stuck with my dodgy drive for a while now cos I doubt I could get a replacement before Christmas, and I haven't got the money anyway. If I can get my hands on an external drive I'll try the test. I think I might have another way of performing this test though, with a little help from you guys. My mate felt a bit guilty I think and has let me borrow his A600HD for a few days . I'm currently in the middle of swapping my internal disk drive for his, to check for sure its my drive thats knackered. By pure fluke I've done something to get his HD working so.... Could I put X-Copy on his HD, temporarily put my floppy drive in his machine, and then run X-Copy off the HD to test the drive. This is the first time I've had an Amiga Hard-drive to play with so I don't know nothing. All I need is for you to tell me how to get X-Copy on his HD, if it is possible. Or maybe i could copy the files into RAM, both the A600s at my disposale have 2Mb. Any ideas are appreciated. I've alredy tried my disk cleaner, and even opened it up and applied some of the fluid manually via toilet paper (probably not a good idea, but I was desperate).

18 December 2002, 20:04	#8
ElectroBlaster Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Exeter, Devon, UK Age: 49 Posts: 1,706	M8! got any of those cotton bud/ear cleaner stick thingies? if you have use one with a bit of cleaning fluid on it and clean each head carefully until its clean! it sounds like that wb2 disk you used was rotten... floppys have a tendancy to mould over time if they arent kept properly so when you slap em in a drive! the heads get clogged with shit!

18 December 2002, 21:01	#9
NytroX86 Posts: n/a	Today was my last day at college, so I'll try out the cotton bud cleaning with meths and/or my cleaner (not at the same time obviously). Since this is kind of about my mates Amiga as well and the thread name isn't really limiting, I thought I'd ask something about his HD here. When I first switch it on it won't load and goes to the floppy startup screen. After a reset the HD just clicks and the light shows almost constant activity, and the only way to get the machine to check the floppy again is to turn the miggy off and on. However after playing Ruff 'n' Tumble for half an hour I took the disk out, reset the machine and the HD loaded. It loaded fine from then on. Its been off for an hour or so now so I tried it again. The HD won't load again, and I'm now quite sure why it didn't. I believe the HD works once the miggy and it have heated up a bit. Thats the only way I can explain it working after the machines been in some use. I don't think it can be a simple matter of sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't, it definately starts working after the Amigas been used for a while. Could my heat theory be correct?

18 December 2002, 22:11	#10
ElectroBlaster Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Exeter, Devon, UK Age: 49 Posts: 1,706	AH right this hard drive problem sounds like the drive is: 1. Too slow to spin up in which case the amiga wont see it and thats why you get the disk loading screen! turn the amiga on from cold and then reset it... if it loads the hard drive then you know its fine... amiga's are so quick some old drives couldnt keep up lol! *I always thought this problem was only limited to the a1200 but i could be wrong! 2. The drive could be faulty or have a faulty cable.... god forbid it could be a faulty ide controller but i doubt it!

18 December 2002, 23:29	#12
ElectroBlaster Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Exeter, Devon, UK Age: 49 Posts: 1,706	good luck m8 ive seen nearly every possible problem with amiga's lol! ive had so many of em...

18 December 2002, 23:32	#13
NytroX86 Posts: n/a	I thought I might as well ask this as part of this thread. How do I transfer the contents of a floppy to a hard drive? I tried dragging and dropping my X-Copy so I could try and test my floppy drive but I got an error message every time and Workbench then freezes. I don't even knows if it would load, but I'm curious how to move files without an installer now. It must be possible, for if you wanted to backup work to a HD.

19 December 2002, 01:31	#14
Overdoc Commodore Collector Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Austria Age: 53 Posts: 944	Well, if you get X-Copy working via HD then that would be a great thing since it could tell you what's wrong ! But be careful: Forget the idea of loading X-Copy into Ram with the good drive, then change it to the broken one while the A-600 is running or somewthing alike ! This can kill your CIA, which means death fo the motherboard unless you have some SMD soldering skills ! Remember: NEVER plug anything on or off while the machine is running !! Just one question: Does the drive start spinning when you insert a disk ? If you are not sure then look into the drive from the slot side, and push down the small pin you will see on the far left side of th slot. Then the spindle motor should start spinning. Btw. what's the exact name and type number of your broken drive ? Is it a Chinon ? Or a Panasonic/Matsushita, Teac, Epson,.... ?

20 December 2002, 02:56	#16
Overdoc Commodore Collector Join Date: Aug 2001 Location: Austria Age: 53 Posts: 944	Well, congratulations ! You have been lucky, because the upper head is rather easy to align ( can be done just by eye measure, like I also do that ), while the lower one ( that means both, because the upper is fixed to the lower one ) is much more difficult ! I suspected the upper head, because in the few cases where a bad disk killed my drive it also always was the upper head which got out of alignment. I think this comes from sticky disks which take the head with them when rotating and therefore can draw the upper head to the side a ittle bit. When you can load X-Copy now you can do the checkdisk trick to be sure the heds are in optimal alignment and all tracks on both sides can be read at first time. Also check lower and upper head separately or some single tracks above 70. Btw., turning the Amiga on without keyboard is no problem. Also a missing drive shouldn't hurt anything Now enjoy the second life of your reanimated A-600 over X-mas

20 December 2002, 03:52	#17
ElectroBlaster Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Exeter, Devon, UK Age: 49 Posts: 1,706	thats a small bit of info thats been learned! next time it happens or your offered an amiga with a suspect drive you will know what to look at first

20 December 2002, 04:37	#18
Amiga1992 Registered User Join Date: May 2001 Location: ? Posts: 19,645	The girlfriend of RE-ANIMATOR!

20 December 2002, 04:44	#19
ElectroBlaster Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Exeter, Devon, UK Age: 49 Posts: 1,706	LOL

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