A1200 Teac floppy?

[Secret Vampire]

Hi All,

Last week I picked up an A1200 from a car boot for £5, it was kind of filthy, and didn't come with a PSU or mouse or the usual box of 200 pirate games and a knackered zipstick. I don't even remotely need another A1200 but the price was right, so...
A good scrub with a toothbrush and sugar soap sorted the case and keys (Which have somehow yellowed to differing degrees on each row, giving an interesting striped effect). The machine works properly apart from the LEDs which are dead, but the floppy drive is misbehaving, it has problems with a great many discs. it loads workbench fine, but most games cause it to complain about having a non-dos disc in DF0. The machine has a Teac drive instead of the usual Mitsumi, but it appears to be original, however I wouldn't put it past C= to have included a subtly incompatible drive at some point to save money.
Initially the drive had a piece of green plastic, which appears to be part of a kinder surprise toy, wedged deep within, so it's possible this caused some damage, or it might just be dirty, I'm going to attempt to find a cleaning disc to test this hypothesis.
Does anyone know if Teac mechanisms are known to be problematic, or is this one just faulty?
And also, what should I do with it? I initially thought I'd clean it up and sell it on to a good home, but now it's sitting there in front of the TV I'm thinking about maybe getting a RAM card or cheap 030 accelerator, if such things exist these days, and an IDE flash adaptor and using it for games. Problem is, there aren't a great many RAM cards floating around these days, and a lot of people seem to want stupid money for them, because they're 'rare'

[prowler]

Hi Secret Vampire,

I don't know about Amiga floppy drives, but I've just been testing Stedy's Amiga to PC floppy drive adapter using a Mitsumi PC floppy drive in connection with this thread:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=39042
and it worked fine.

However, when I tried the same thing with a Teac PC floppy drive, it didn't work at all!

prowler

[Loedown]

Greetings,
When I used to fix TV, if a Teac came in, you always replaced C909 and C910 BEFORE you did anything else.

Teac = Horrible cheap shit

Paul

[Secret Vampire]

So I found the cleaning disk, gave it a squirt of isopropyl and stuck it in. Now nothing reads at all :/
I'm thinking a temporary loan of the floppy that's in my A600, possibly followed by one of stedy's adaptors is the correct course of action.

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Secret Vampire

I'm thinking a temporary loan of the floppy that's in my A600, possibly followed by one of stedy's adaptors is the correct course of action.

Hi Secret Vampire,

That definitely sounds like the best way forward. I've tested Stedy's adapter, as you know, and I would thoroughly recommend it. Also the thread, or his website, includes a list of drives successfully tested with it.

And tomorrow, I hope to be able to test the ability of the adapter to handle two drives connected to a standard PC floppy drive cable using a
special adapter I made previously for a similar job.

So stay tuned.

prowler

[Chain]

bin teh teac and get a proper amiga drive like Chinon
they still can be found in some old PCs, and it needs only rejumpering for Ami

[Chain]

Originally Posted by Secret Vampire

So I found the cleaning disk, gave it a squirt of isopropyl and stuck it in. Now nothing reads at all :/

"cleaning disk kit" = drive killer! remember that

[Jope]

Eh? I've run cleaning disks thru my drives several times (usually after long adf xfer sessions) and never broken a drive.

But whatever, don't use them if your cleaning disk breaks your drives.

My experience with Teac drives is very positive, they are reliable mechanisms. Too bad this one is broken, it's not like they are infallible or anything.

[Secret Vampire]

The plot thickens... the drive seems to work just fine if I unplug the stack of external floppies. Perhaps it's a power problem, though I'm using the power supply that doesn't get hot and smell funny, and which I therefore thought of as being the good one. Or could it be something more sinister?

[cosmicfrog]

you did`t mention the external floppys before. did they come with the amiga ? if so what are they like

[extralife]

so u are running a stack of drives on this thing all drawing power through your a1200 ? If so, that could be the case, though probly unlikely, but when i just got back into amiga again, I used to stack 060,hardrives and cdrom on a standard powersupply, not something my miggy liked very much, coz it simply wouldnt boot lol

[Secret Vampire]

I've had the external ones for ages, one Cumana, one Roctec, and one unbranded. They all work, but I don't think I've ever run a system with all 3 attached at once before. I'm going to have to go through and test them with the 1200 one by one to see if one of them is causing bad behaviour from the internal drive. It puzzles me though, that all 3 external drives worked fine together and only the internal didn't want to play nicely.

[Secret Vampire]

Originally Posted by extralife

so u are running a stack of drives on this thing all drawing power through your a1200 ? If so, that could be the case, though probly unlikely, but when i just got back into amiga again, I used to stack 060,hardrives and cdrom on a standard powersupply, not something my miggy liked very much, coz it simply wouldnt boot lol

I used to run a couple of floppies and a 3.5" hard drive off a standard A1200 PSU (the solid brick type, I miss it's foot warming properties in winter) which was totally fine, things got a bit unstable when I put an 040 in there though.

I'd have thought that the PSU would be rated to handle the load, but then, I need to remember that it's a nearly 20 years old PSU, so perhaps isn't performing as well as it once did.