1.44MB FLOPPIES
3 messages in this thread
Help!!
I had a spur of the moment "great idea" when I ran across a good price on 3
1/2 inch floppy drives. Only thing is, their 1.44mb drives, made by
Samsung (model SFD-321D). My 2000's DF0: died, and I'm looking to replace
it. Does anyone know if the Samsung 1.44mb drive can be made to work?
It has two sets of jumpers on it labeled like this: DS0 DS1
o o o
o o o
DC1 RDY
I tried a total of 14 different combination of settings, and the best I got
was a partially working format of a blank disk, and it couldn't read a
formatted disk.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!
>>Steve.
P.S. I can return the drives, so if you know where I can get a good price
on drives that will work on an Amiga, I'll take that too!
I was wondering about that just this afternoon! Except I asked myself, can
I simply use a PC 1.44 meg drive as a regular Amiga disk drive, with no
hope or expectation of using the 1.44 M mode. After all, the higher
density disks are detected by an extra notch. Is this switching done at
the hardware level, so when I insert a double-density (regular) floppy,
will it function like an Amiga drive? I suspect it's just a matter of
performing a hardware hack that twiddles something on the drive select line
– that's what you need to do to make a 5 1/4 PC floppy work on an Amiga.
I got to thinking about this because I'd like to get a disk duplicator.
There are machines available for the PC that are little more than a regular
floppy disk drive surrounded by a nitfy mechanism that robotically inserts
and removes disks. The whole apparatus is driven over the serial port
using very simple commands. I thought, I could perform that PC-to-Amiga
hack and the drive would work on the Amiga. But then I wondered, what if
the drive in the box is the 1.44 floppy mechanism?
(Any Amiga developers / publishers who have a line on disk-duping machines,
please reply…)
Well John, I certainly don't have any knowledge in the disk duplicating
area, but I'd definately be interested a hack that would allow a 1.44 m
disk to run on my Amiga. Do you suppose some information could be gleaned
from the old file on how to make the 5 1/4 pc floppy work on an Amiga? I'd
forgot about that hack. Anyone else have any ideas? >>Steve.