It does sound like the simple option unless you can find a local person selling a complete Amiga for £10 in your local paper. I guess I would also investigate putting the external drive inside the Amiga as a test to be sure though. I guess its all down to your finances  :lol:

the first thing i would do is take out the drive and give it a good clean.

if your not comfortable to do this,
get yourself a disc cleaner,dont forget to clean the disc sensing switch, bottom left front, use a small brush with some meths or alcohol, gently press it up & down a few times, this usualy works.

I haven't really done alot about it yet.

I did try an old disk cleaner on it tonight, didn't seem to make any difference.

I will give cleaning in the way described by twizzle a go(maybe not taking the drive out, but just giving it a clean from the front).

It shouldn't be to hard to take it out if I need to, the Amiga is in a tower case. It doesn't have a facia on the front  of the disk drive either (I know, thats probably the route of my problem!), so I can get to the front of it easily.

Its not bothering me too much really at the moment. Most of my old games are installed on the Hard drive, or they just work anyway. It only seems a few games have to know that a disk has been changed, instead of the usual, press a button when you've changed the disk.

I don't know if this makes a difference, but it seems like at the moment my Amiga thinks it has a disk in the drive even when it dosn't. I.e. if you disable the Hard drive and leave it to boot from disk it doesn't go to the usual 'insert disk' screen, but instead trys to load from the non-existent disk and gets a 'Non-dos disk' error. Workbench  always shows DF0:?? when a disk is not present as well.

Thanks for the help so far. If anyone else has any ideas please let me know.

Ok. Just spent the day with the Amiga open!

I had the intention of fitting the network PCMCIA card I bought a while ago(have to open the tower up as the slot is inside the case!)

Whilst there I though I'd give the drive cleaning ago, it quickly became clear that the drive have developed a bad case of rust, which was spreading to the circuit board of the drive and the Amiga case! Oh dear.

I decided from there that a replacment drive was in order, so I went and got the A600 that was sitting in a box unused. So I took the drive out of there, and also noticed that this drive was a bit different and had a chance of fitting the old facia that came with the case.

So after a bit of fiddling around I've managed to fit the 600 drive in, and make it look better(not to mention keeping it safe) with the facia. All seems to be working fine so far!

Might need to get a new drive now to replace the 600 one, but that can wait. I don't suppose theres alot that can be done for the old drive now?