Hello Amigans,
I have an A2000 without any internal floppy drives installed. I can pull a drive out of my other A2000 but I thought that I woud first ask if it is possible to boot an A2000 using an external floppy drive as I have a few of them to choose from.

Thank You,
AmigaEd

Normally, to boot off an external drive you need to either select it as the boot drive in the Early Startup Menu (KS 2.04+ only) or use Degrader to force a boot from DF2:, which would require an already booted system, a catch-22.

However, with no internal floppies hooked up, I think the first external floppy will default to be DF0:. If not, then the system will try to boot from DF1:. At least, that's how it works on the A1200.

So yeah, you should be fine with an external drive :-)

You could open up an external drive and take it out of th ecase, then put it as an internal drive in the A2000. I've done that in the past.

@AmigaEd

I believe since Kickstart 2 the Amiga does a scan for bootable floppies in progression on the A2000 from df0, df1...df2 (external). On the A500/A2000 iirc the external floppy port is always df2. But I haven't used KS1.2 in a very long time.

This is an old one but if anyone else googles it it might be good to have a response.

It should be possible to do the same mod on the A2000 as the A500 or A600, attack the CIA-B directly and connect the CIA _SEL0 to motherboard signal _SEL2. That would mean, disconnect pin13 and 15 connect 13 to where 15 was.
This will disable the original df0: leave df1: as it were and connect df2: which would be the external drive to where df0: was.
I'm not sure it will work without a df1: hooked up, there's a jumper on the motherboard to disable df1, don't remember what it's called right now.

The _SELx are found on pins 13-16 if you need to mix these up some more, perhaps you want to external drives as df0: and df1: then you need to move CIA pin13 and 14 to where 15 and 16 was attached. Or add a switch so you can switch back.

Two sockets, some wire and a switch is all you need if you don't want to mess with the original  hardware. Then just plug this "selector" on the motherboard and the CIA in your selector.