ScuzzBlog: Diaries March 2020 Entry 4th March 2020: Post 01: A-500 - My failing floppy Pt I A-500 - My failing floppy Pt I It is common place to have a clunky noisy floppy drive on an A-500. You have to remember that these drives are like thirty years old. So I can forgive a drive for being a little noisy, but what I can't tolerate is not reading disks. I had pulled this Amiga 500 to add to my feature on the numbers of A-500s I own and discovered that whilst it loaded the disk from the getgo it didn't load the disk again when I withdrew it. So I tried another disk and got the same result. The problem seemed to get worse the more I used the drive until it was refusing to boot also from a cold start. Nothing for it but to have a look inside the computer and see what was going on. Man was that a bad idea. I had four long sessions with this Amiga 500 in what was a marathon effort to get this A-500 computer working with the floppy drive. Here is what happened. A-500 - My failing floppy Pt I At first glance this computer works fine. A lovely mellow case and keyboard. You can almost sense where the machine sat in respect of the window. Starting easy she fired up 1.2 And then my very brown 1.3. However, the label suggested issues so I decided to go have a look. Rubber feet and star screw heads. Made in Hong Kong and quite early. Or not. I recall the strange mod to the RAM card. But that keyboard is not what I expected. My records show this machine to have had the proper ribbon connector. Plus the floppy drive looks real alien. My original keyboard for this machine was much cleaner. Not sure what is going on here. Anyway I gave it a quick clean. Definitely not the keyboard that was on this machine. So I swapped out the keyboard so as to remove that from the probable issues. So red to green. The RAM card is as it should be. And this is the motherboard. A Rev 6A and so not an early A-500. The booting was less than consistent. She booted every time with the disk inserted. But would very often stop clicking when the disk was removed. So I pulled the keyboard and the floppy ribbon and booted on its own. I got the floppy insert so the motherboard is fine. Not sure why the floppy drive isn't clicking once the disk is removed. I tried an external floppy which would only work when booting with the floppy in drive DF0 when initially booted. The external drive is picked up no problem. I decided to check the sensor pins and noticed nasty goo on the capacitors. I need to check the model type cus that may be hot glue cus they are mounted on glue pads below. For good measure I swapped the CIAs. The machine was still struggling to recognise the disk insert after being removed. Very frustrating. The problem kinda got worse the more I used the computer to the point she stopped booting from the inserted floppy. The drive just span round with no actual read taking place. Time for a cuppa and reflection. READ NEXT BLOG

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Last updated 4th March 2020

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