Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
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Thread: a1200 wont load floppies
Zetr0 15:56 1st June 2008
@xdanger

Hello there, welcome to the boards

Glad you have found the retr0liciousness of the Amiga1200 now its time to help you use it

Firstly the CIAs in the A1200 are nothing like that in other previous models of Amiga, they are integrated into VSLI chips. however i must thank you for the hardware pr0n of the A500's CIA's very nice indeed

Now the Floppy drive has very little do with CIA's as these are mainly for timing latches of memory locations such like chip ram, pcmcia, joyport etc (mouse port is controlled by paula).

As you have discovered, FDD's usually get incredibly cruddy and will refuse to work, sometimes the only way is completely strip and clean the drive. I have read some where, where some clever spark managed to change the heads of the FDD from one of a PC FDD and it worked flawlessly. But when a drive is beyond repair it is because the drive motor that fails to spin properly and hence the sync constantly fails (error city!)

Changing the FDD is perhaps the best thing to do at this point, once you have this you can then getto grips with cleaning the old one, and with a little luck you could end up with a working spare to sell or keep

again, welcome to the boards theres so much mischief to get upto so kick back, releax and enjoy the chocolate coated retroness that this fair board provides
[Reply]
xdanger 16:06 1st June 2008
My little a600 is about to get reaped for its FDD

something like "card drive" shows up in the boot options of the 1200 ,Is that just the card bus/controller for a possible drive?

And whats that slot for on the right at the back next to the mouse port, a hdd?

I had an a500 back in the day so aga is new to me.
[Reply]
Zetr0 16:44 1st June 2008
xdanger

the A1200 is essentially the baby brother of the Amiga A4000, it has PCMCIA like the a600 on the left, and two expansion ports, one underneath (the trapdoor slot) for accelerators and memory upgradesm and one rear expansion bay. (this is customarlly used if you have a as a SCSI card in your a1200)

Internally the A1200 has IDE, like the A600, but this is where the similarites end, the A1200 has a Clock Port Expansion port (some motherboard revsions have the headers removed but you can replace them if you are handy at soldering) this expansion port allows for things like USB, Sound Cards, mp3 decoders and of course.... a clock.. LOL

the trapdoor expansion port, has MANY expansions for it... most are memory to memory and CPU accelerators have a look here

The A1200 is my love as far as Amiga go's, although i long to own an A4000 big box amiga, theres always that something about the A1200
[Reply]
xdanger 17:26 1st June 2008
I swapped the floppy drive and it works great

Also I have a HDD from a 600HD that was a bit ropey so I swapped it out, Cant remember what Workbench version is on there.

Can I format that drive for my HDD'less 1200 and install 3.0 onto it easily or would I need something else ?
[Reply]
Zetr0 23:51 1st June 2008
Originally Posted by xdanger:
....
Can I format that drive for my HDD'less 1200 and install 3.0 onto it easily or would I need something else ?
indeed you can its very simple you just need workbench 3.0 disks, attach the hard disk and put the workbench install disk in, and boot the machine... from this prepare the hard disk and then click the installer...

If memory serves though, under 3.0 you may have to boot using workbench and then set the drive up using HDToolsBox (tools directory). and then once you have configured the hard drive geometry you save off and then boot with the Install disk.

From this, you can just install as normal

best of luck
[Reply]
Harrison 01:49 2nd June 2008
However if you have a standard set of Workbench 3.0 disks that came with a non HD A1200 then you might not have the install disk as part of the set. You should however still be able to format the drive and install Workbench manually. If this is the case just install the HD, then boot from the WB3 floppy and then copy the contents of all of the Workbench disks onto the HD (making sure you copy all the content (show all files). Tip: copying the files from an AmigaDos Shell is easiest.
[Reply]
Cortona 20:51 10th September 2008
I have the same problem as xdanger: neither the internal or external 3.5" floppies on my A1200 will read disks anymore. Until very recently they loaded a file or a game in maybe 1 in 20 attempts, and then I tried to clean them...

I bought a 3.5" floppy disk cleaning kit and tried that, but no dice. Gave them a good air dusting. Nothing. Read/write errors and grinding every time.

I have WB3 installed on the hard drive, so I can boot into that. If I insert a floppy in WB I just get the disk icon with DF0:???

So it seems like I have two options. 1) buy a replacement internal floppy - I'm sure I've seen one on eBay for about £20 - or 2) get a cheap n' nasty A600 and gut it for the internal floppy. Neither of which does anything for my external drive (God I hope this is a mechanical failure and not chip-related.)

Basically, I don't want to throw loads of money at the problem, otherwise I might just as well pick up another A1200 for £40+P&P, which would be silly.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Dan
[Reply]
Harrison 23:16 10th September 2008
There are ebay sellers who sell just the drives from A1200's so you could just buy a replacement drive. Another alternative is to convert a PC drive to work. Some models of PC drive can be converted quite easily but I don't personally know too much about how to do it.
[Reply]
Tiago 23:32 10th September 2008
some time ago i post some pc floppy drives that could be converted to Amiga. Most of them you only had to cross to wires from the cable... dont know if it's true, i try it and didnt work....

But i guess Zetr0 must know something about it
[Reply]
Cortona 19:57 10th October 2008
Woop! The internal floppy drive I bought on eBay about three weeks ago finally arrived today; packaged in a Sainsbury's cat food pouch selection 'Chunks in Jelly' box. (Chicken & Turkey and Salmon, in case you were wondering. If only my cat was such a cheap date instead of being a Felix/Iams hog.) Not the most promising of starts but at least the drive was snuggled down in a bed of shredded paper and bubble wrap.

Now I just need to find the time to chuck it in my A1200. When you've got two offspring under 3 and a demanding spouse, there just isn't any time for anything. (I'm only on here now because the little one is clamped onto the wife, but that's probably more info than you need.)
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