Hands on alignment of an Amiga disk drive
Вставка
- Опубліковано 9 лип 2024
- We have 2 disk drives to look at this week. One of them just needs aligned which is the main focus of the video, the other I bought spares or repairs with no idea what's wrong with it...
As I said in the video aligning a disk drive manually like this isn't necessarily the correct way to do it but it certainly is a lot easier than hooking up a scope and a lot cheaper than buying a test diskette (£60). I can't say for certain that it is aligned correctly but if it reads everything I try then surely that's enough.
Software used in this video
Amiga Test Kit - github.com/keirf/Amiga-Stuff/...
CRG Links
CRG X (Twitter) - / yt_crg
CRG Patreon - www.patreon.com/user?u=13919007
CRG Discord - / discord
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:48 Drive 1 inspection
04:41 Testing
06:57 Track 0 sensor adjustment (Lower head)
10:50 Upper head adjustment
13:48 Booting from DF1
14:55 Floppy drive speed
15:28 Lubrication
16:26 Quick note
17:40 Drive 2
18:40 Its dead Jim
20:47 Conclusion - Наука та технологія
Great video! Thank you!
Super!
I repair my Chinon FZ-354 with this tutorial! Thank's !
Helpful video thanks, I will try to fix my A600 drive tomorrow :)
😃Wow lesson learnt on those screws! Glad to hear its nice and clean and maybe too clean without much grease! Looking forward to receiving it! Many thanks Glen!
You're more than welcome. The drive is on its way back and hopefully it arrives safely for you to start enjoying some games again.
Great Video Glen. I’ll be referring back to this vid when u tackle a few of my own Amiga floppy drives.
Thanks, glad to hear you enjoyed it and I hope it will be useful for you.
Commodore didn't make it easy for code in a custom boot block to know what drive it has been booted from. This is how I did it back in the day. The OS does give you a pointer to the IORequest for the boot drive. Then the trick is to loop through all possible floppy drives, with a loop index and open a new trackdisk device for each. You can then compare each trackdisk device's IORequest's io_Unit pointer to find the one that matches the io_Unit pointer for the IORequest passed in. The index for the current trackdisk can be used as the drive index that the floppy was booted from.
Great video! a couple of weeks ago I just bought a broken external drive on ebay listed as broken, it powers up but does nothing... I am gonna do what you did here :)
Thanks glad you found it useful. Certainly try Amiga Test Kit and see how it reports the heads. If they are out start with the lower head. Some Amiga disk drives also need the capacitors replacing to bring them back so that's worth checking too.
Please let me know how you get on.
I learnt a lot from this video my friend :).. I wont be touching those screws any time soon lol. I've never used the disk section of the Amiga test kit either so I know how that works now too. Cool :)..
Thanks, glad to hear you enjoyed the video. Yeah don't be removing any screws that have glue on them. The disk section of ATK is certainly useful, this was the first time I used it for aligning a drive but it seemed to work well and was far easier than I initially thought.
I like your videos
it would be good to put lock tite on the screw tops after screwed in and corrected
Yes, that would be useful to stop anyone from undoing it again in the future.
Is the lower head soldered? I mean, what would it take to re-attach it?
You will never guess what I have lol😊
Who thought that putting the lower head on top of the upper head in the head calibration tool is just wrong?
I have a pile of 3.5inch floppy drives on a shelf. About 10 of them. Various makes and models. Do you want any? They were out of old PCs so not specifically amiga drives.
Im not sure what the difference is between an amiga FDD and a PC FDD.
Thanks for the offer but I've also got a pile of spare pc drives. Other than Amiga drives being double density there is some signalling differences. You can convert a pc drive to work on an Amiga easily enough.
Hola Nico, te consulto. Tengo la necesidad hacer una distro linux pequeña para programar en ZX Spectrum y Commodore 64, con Emuladores como ZEsarUX y Fuse para Linux. Me podrias dar una mano o de donde se podria buscar info para poder hacerlo. Yo tengo una distro hecha con windows xp (con nlite), para poder hacer esto mismo con ZEsarUX, Fuse y ZXSpin, pero el problema es que no se puede COMPARTIR POR TODOS LADOS, POR QUE ES WINDOWS (por copyright), y quisiera armar algo para que sea libre. Armar un linux pequeño que funcione en 32bits, cargue de forma directa alguno de estos emuladores y listo. No necesito mas. El unico problema que puede existir es que los emuladores necesitan debian. A parte de eso, que como te digo, necesitaria que sea para 32bits, para que en PCs viejas se pueda usar sin problemas. Los 2 emuladores no tienen practicamente ninguna exigencia de hardware.
Como ultimo comentario, si es para programar en Codigo maquina para z80 o basic para ZX Spectrum 48 o 128k y MOS 6502 Assembler. Es para eso especificamente, pero la distro es para no usar hardware viejo.
I searched for "Amiga test kit" on AmiNet and found nothing. Where can I download this software to try and fix my A1010 drive which fell from the desk hard on the ground?
You can get the latest version from here github.com/keirf/Amiga-Stuff/releases
@@CRG oh cool, thank you!
where does the term cylinder come from ?
Each disk comprises of 80 tracks on the top and bottom of the disk. Unlike say a vinyl record each track is just a circle on the disks surface. A cylinder represents both the top and bottom track at any given position.
I'd suspect that someone else damaged the lower head, possibly when the arm broke so they stripped it down to sort it and removed the broken arm :( Shame as if that was the only fault, sure a 3D printed arm could be made.
Yeah that was the plan, make a 3D printed arm to repair the loading mech but with the head broken as it is, it's just beyond it. I may have another lower head and if that works out I'll pull together a follow up.
eBay profit is easier when you buy actual untested lots, or lots that are just defective but no serious repair has been attempted. Once you go down to parts or even components, the success rate goes down quite a bit. Buying some collectors loft after they passed away and the estate selling the whole collection is obviously going to give you much more good stuff than the bits that people have left over after they assembled all the working gear and sold that as working.
My problem with that is if I buy a lot of stuff and find cool things in it then I ultimately want to keep them for my own collection. Hoarder I believe is the common term 😂
I recently binned one of these drives as the ribbon cables were ripped off. Wouldn’t care but it was sat there for months.
With the ribbons ripped off it is more or less bin fodder.