Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!super!udel!gatech!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!agate!sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu!johnf From: johnf@sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: 5.25" drive question Message-ID: <13132@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 10 Aug 88 10:25:38 GMT Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: johnf@sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu () Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 36 Hey folks, I have a small puzzler, the answer to which I suspect might be common knowledge among the Amiga cognoscenti (I am a neophyte of 3-4 months). I decided it would be fun to try and hook up a surplus 5.25" drive to my external drive connector (I have an A500). I built a small interface circuit from an article on one of the Amicus disks written by someone named Marty, which basically translates the Amiga MTRXD* signal into a form expected by IBM-compatible drives, got a power supply for the drive, and made up the cables. Finally, I changed the example mountlist entry for the 5.25"drive to reflect the fact that I was hooking it up as DF1: After playing around with the jumpers for a while on the drive (a 1/2 height, 360K Mitsubishi model M4851-352U) I have it in a configuration where it _almost_ works. The hardware seems to be in fine shape, but mounting the drive is peculiarly difficult: 1) If there is a disk in the drive when I reset the Amiga, the drive is automatically mounted as df1:, but the mountlist entry is ignored. The Amiga assumes that it is an 80-track drive. Thus, when I try to format a disk, all goes well until the drive bangs its head against the wall trying to access tracks 40-79. Kind of amusing, actually. 2) If there is no disk in the drive at boot time, the drive is never recognized. Mount does create a logical device DF1:, but format reports an inability to locate its handler. I note that its handler, "trackdisk.device", is nowhere to be found on disk, but I assume that it is in the roms or something. I tried PCFormat from the Extras disk, though I ultimately want to use the drive as an AmigaDos disk, but it just gurus. I just can't seem to get the computer to mount the drive properly. Any takers? john flanagan johnf@sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu