ScuzzBlog: Diaries March 2020 Entry 30th March 2020: Post 01: Amiga 1200 and the Q and 80 on the 5.25. Amiga 1200 and the Q and 80 on the 5.25. The other day I was trying out my unbranded 5.25" floppy drive on the A600. All was going fine until I got repeat failures trying to copy files over. I could format the drive but not copy. So I set the 5.25" to one side and decided to investigate further. The Amiga will most likely work no problem with an 80 Track 5.25" drive. It will work with the 40 TRK in CrossDOS mode with a special PC1 mount file. Historically I only used the 5.25" in 80 mode and avoided the PC1. So why have the 5.25" drive. If you look at the pictures here you will see the A1200 sitting atop an Amiga 1000 with a 1060 side car. The aim was to use the 5.25" drive to assist in the creation of Amiga floppy disks for the 1060. In the end I fitted a 5.25" to my IBM PS/1 and created my DOS disks that way. The A1200 also has fitted the 'Q' Drive which is a strange CD-ROM as it uses its own file system which sadly will not read CDs that I have burnt myself. It also hangs badly on boot and can struggle if the disc isn't in the player when you boot. So after a while I swapped out this A1200 for another that has the SCSI Squirrel. So why so many Amiga 1200's ?. Cus I can. And I prefer to leave set-ups as they were installed to suit differing peripherals and the like. Just helps a lot. So why wasn't the 5.25" drive working. That was easy. I had the switch on the back set to 40 and not 80. I must have been mucking around with PC disks when I decided to pull the machine, and just didn't flick the switch back. DUH !! Anyhoo I reconnected the A1200, Q and the 5.25 having set the thang to 80 and she worked without fault. I use in the example some very large icons featuring the very lovely Clara Veiga so you can see when I am fiddling with the 5.25" drive. OOOhh er !! Commodore did make the A1020 for the Amiga which sadly is only a 40 Track device. The aim I assume was to feed the emulator and the various PC based software. Dunno. Pretty useless to me. Having set up the A1200 called 'MOOT' I decided to refit the Blizzard 1230IV and have her on permanent for now in the main Amiga store area. I did enjoy mucking around with Aminet disks and sitting atop the 1000 lets me further my customisation of the A1000 disks that I had kinda given up on. Thing is I say I will give up but always return. This way I can look at the Fish CD for useful files. As you do. Amiga 1200 and the Q and 80 on the 5.25. Unbranded 5.25" floppy drive. A1200 that I use with the Amiga 1000. The drive above is a high density drive. Sitting to the left is the 'Q' Drive and CD-ROM. Below the drive is the Amiga 1060 sidecar. The 5.25" floppy is set to 80 Track. The 'Q' Drive uses its own File System. I unhooked the Vidi Amiga and HD floppy given that it is driven by the floppy and I didn't want to tax the A1200. And so we are ready. I use big Clara Veiga icons to make understanding the drives easier on screen. Clara Veiga is the Amiga based 5.25" floppy volume without a special mount file. The 'Q' Drive has Aminet Volume 11 for reference. I can copy a few files over to test. DOpus shows the current Devs/DOSDrivers And note that there is no PC1 for DF1. OK let me Format a new 5.25" floppy. The drive is treated as a 3.5" format. I name the floppy as scuzz and test copy a file. And now scuzz appears as DF1. And there is the file I copied. I then copy an animation plus a Clara Veiga disk.info file for the big icon. I also copy some Aminet files into a BBS drawer for good measure. And all the files and drawers appears on the 5.25" drive just as a 3.5" drive. And I created a PC1 for using CrossDOS but chose not to mount it. This is the mountfile for 40 Tracks. The Flags set to 1 is essential if you want to read as a 40 Track device. One thing I find useful when using external devices is to set ECHO to ON in the User-Startup. That way you see the script of the loading process on boot. If the computer halts booting it will hang on the line identifying the device and let you know which one aint working. Time to copy over SysInfo. And there are all the drives listed. This is the contents of the Aminet CD. And this is your boot priority from holding both mouse buttons down on boot. Very useful. I had to do some deep digging to source the power rating for the 'Q'Drive. OK time to reinstall the Blizzard 1230IV. The current 2.5" internal drive. The 3.0 ROMs which are just fine. Enter the mighty Blizzard. I never bother installing from below. I fit from above. Watch that shielding. Good idea to add a little electrical tape to stop shorting. 32MB RAM. The only way to go. The interface top left is for the SCSI KIT. My sticky note. Computer name and Commodore label.

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Last updated 30th March 2020

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