HD Floppy Drives!!!
Bonehead alert!
I've got the problem solved.
I have an early A3000 (MotherBoard rev 8.9) that had a floppy cable with a
twist in 3 wires (pins 4-6) (I guess SOME machines have flat cables?)
Because I have an AMAXII+ & a Toaster in my A3000, I was forced to make a
new longer floppy drive cable – fortunately, I made it extra long. I
needed the extra length even more after I found out that:
It appears that DF0: MUST be hooked to the last connector on the cable,
with jumpers set on the drive set to DS0.
DF1, is then connected to the middle connector, with jumpers set to DS1.
(I was trying to put DF0: on the middle connector and DF1: on the last
conn., just to keep DF0: [now an HD floppy drive] in the left bay where
its always been [I'm a creature of habit] – the cables fit better that
way. I still have DF0: in the left bay, the cables run all the way from my
AMAXII+ board over to DF1: in the right bay, and then BACK to DF0: in the
left bay.) What a mess! But it works!
I did verify that the HD floppy will not work as DF1: (I had seen that
documented in messages from others). You get an error when trying to
format/read disks.
I also downloaded a file called 'HDFIX.LHA' from one of the Amiga
sections. This proved quite useful.
'HDFixer' is a patch to the 37.175 kickstart that fixes a bug where
QuarterBack (and others I guess) would not recognize the HD floppy. With
HDFixer running, QuarterBack had no problem determining the size of the
floppy in DF0: and thus backed up over 1.3MB onto a single 3.5" disk.
Hope this is of some use to others who, like I, will try to install the
floppy drive themselves w/o documentation (app. Commodore just sends the
drive with no literature – such support!).
Keep On Toastin'
Erik Flom
P.S. It seems to work fine as an HD flopy drive under AMAXII. I've even
mounted MS-DOS HD disks – and we all know how painful that can be! :^)