CompuServe Messages

If you bought your floptical from an Insite approved PC vendor TWO difficulties prevent you from using your floptical on your Amiga. You must have both conditions satisfied. 1) you must have special program that sends a SCSI MODE command with the appropiate floptical specific parameter to unlock the floptical drive. The floptical drive otherwise power up as locked which means you _cannot_ write to any disk inserted. This mode command must be sent via AmigaDOS direct SCSI driver access. All A2090 and 2090'a have damaged direct SCSI access. 2) you must have a mountlist or RDB for the drive. Also you must high level AmigaDOS only format the floptical disk. This is impossible on the 2090's since its driver requires that you Prep the drive. But the 2090 Prep program low level formats the drive which would be unacceptable to the floptical media and drive whose normal mode in low level formatting is to map out errors on the media in the formatting which Prep will not accept. Your only choice is to buy a new controller that does proper direct SCSI access. This will interfere with your current MFM drive. You would also need special programs to format AmigaDOS 720k and 1.44M 3.5" floppies in order to use those lower media floppies which the drive is capable of using.