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Offline irishmikeTopic starter

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A4000 Floppy (and other Drives) Question
« on: July 19, 2006, 05:56:35 PM »
Greetings all:

I was under the misguided perception that you could use a regular PC (Chinon) floppy in your A4000 system.  Since I have learned that this is not the case without modification, I thought I would ask you guys -- Can a regular old Chinon HD floppy drive be modified to work in an Amiga?  If so, how do you do the modification?

BTW:  If this is not possible, I would like to find one of these -- just add a floppy to list of parts ;-)

While I am at it, regular IDE drives should work in the case for the CD(RW) and Hard Disk?  Are there size limitations like the 4GB idea?  Appreciate any help on this.

Thanks,

Mike
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Offline Thomas

Re: A4000 Floppy (and other Drives) Question
« Reply #1 on: July 19, 2006, 06:12:58 PM »
Quote
While I am at it, regular IDE drives should work in the case for the CD(RW) and Hard Disk? Are there size limitations like the 4GB idea? Appreciate any help on this.


You can connect two IDE drives to the IDE bus (one master and one slave). HDDs will work out of the box (after being partitioned and formatted), CD drives need additional drivers, because the built-in IDE driver does not recognise ATAPI drives.

The 4GB limit applies to all devices but can be extended by additional software drivers.

The only problem with software drivers is that they have to be loaded from disk and as such the partition the drivers are loaded from has to be accessible by the built-in driver i.e. inside the first 4GB of the HDD.

Bye,
Thomas
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Offline orange

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Re: A4000 Floppy (and other Drives) Question
« Reply #2 on: July 19, 2006, 07:22:52 PM »
PC floppy can easily be made to reliably work as DD (just swap a few wires).
To make it work as HD you need to do some serious hacking, its all on aminet hard/hack. (But it seems that those hacks are buggy, not reliable.. as docs say)
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Offline irishmikeTopic starter

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Re: A4000 Floppy (and other Drives) Question
« Reply #3 on: July 19, 2006, 08:37:16 PM »
@orange

Looked an aminet and don't see this hack listed, perhaps I am looking for it in the wrong place.  I searched on hard/hack and got 4 results.  None seems to refer to floppies.

Thanks for the help and please advise on the exact file name of the hack.
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Offline TjLaZer

Re: A4000 Floppy (and other Drives) Question
« Reply #4 on: July 20, 2006, 04:53:58 AM »
I have modified certain Chinon FZ-357 drives for use as 880k drives, do a search for FZ-357  ;)
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Offline orange

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Re: A4000 Floppy (and other Drives) Question
« Reply #5 on: July 20, 2006, 08:00:07 AM »
First have a look at pinouts:
amiga floppy pinout ext/int

PC floppy

it should take a little time to figure which wires to switch, just remember all PC floppys are factory made as "DS1", i.e. DF1: or B: if cable is not twisted, so for eg. IIRC you should connect DriveSel0 from computer to DriveSel1 on floppy. Also need to switch diskchange signal to appropriate pin. Last thing, if you want nonDOS games to work you need a single diode to get RDY signal (easy way, there are more elaborate solutions, look at links).  I cant remember orientation atm, will tell you later, if you need it
related aminet links:

DD:
PcF2AmF.lha (easy way)

informative, but not necessary:
floppyinterfac.lha
FDDx2toInt.lha
A1200FDfix.lha
AT1200mod.lha
DriveSolution.lha


As for HD:

drv-1.44.lha
PCFloppy2Amiga.lha
.. maybe I missed some.

I never did try HD modification, you need to slow down drive from 300rpm to 150.. etc
Let me know if you manage to get HD working.

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Offline irishmikeTopic starter

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Re: A4000 Floppy (and other Drives) Question
« Reply #6 on: November 13, 2006, 02:55:30 PM »
Hello All:

Back in July, I asked about the hard drive.  I have my A4000 up and running and have a 4 GB hard disk to put in.  I also have a 20 GB hard disk that would be cool to install.  I am hoping to run the CD-ROM and Hard drive off the IDE chain.

Someone mentioned being able to run a higher capacity hard drive with a driver, I was hoping someone could point me in the direction of a good driver so I could perhaps run my 20 GB in the 4k :-)

Thanks,

Mike

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Offline LoadWB

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Re: A4000 Floppy (and other Drives) Question
« Reply #7 on: November 14, 2006, 05:39:53 AM »
I can tell you that I used the latest scsi.device from the OS3.9 ROM Update to recognize a 160GB drive, though HDToolBox would only partition a 127GB partition (IIRC) and formatting only saw 7GB.  (Weird.)

As for the floppy bit, ISTR that the oddity of the HD drive is due to the Amiga floppy controller having a max bit rate of 250kbps.  The Amiga-compatible HD floppy drive slows the drive to 150RPM to ensure that a HD floppy bit rate stays at 250kbps.

Posit: The Amiga floppy controller is limited to 250kbps
Consequence: The Amiga requires non-standard floppy drives
Result: Using standard floppy drives requires special equipment and drivers
Conclusion: A special configuration in the forthcoming/upcoming/God-sent CloneA chipset is called for ;-)
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Offline motrucker

Re: A4000 Floppy (and other Drives) Question
« Reply #8 on: November 15, 2006, 05:20:45 AM »
I don't have 3.9 (yet), so I use "ffstd64.lha" (on Aminet) to use >4Gb hard drives.
The easiest way to use it, is to take your 3.1 floppys (The Install disk) and switch FFS files (Can the one on the disk and add the FFSTD64) and set everything up as normal. I'm running a 20Gb drive in my A1200 this way with no trouble.
I did add OS 3.5, and this setup has worked fine for years.
If you have 3.9, it should be even easier.....
Good luck................
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