Expert: Gregory Donner - 3/13/2008

Question
Hello,

I recently bought an Amiga (500) internal floppy disk from Vesalia (www.vesalia.de). It is a 34 pin disk drive (I guess it is a modified standard PC floppy disk drive). I connected it to my Amiga 500 and it seems not to work properly, although it booted at least one diskette (but then didn't load the rest of it). There was no answer from them to my question on how to use it properly. However, maybe I could connect it to a PC and use some specific software to read and/or write Amiga diskettes on the PC using that 34 pin disk drive.
Can you please confirm if that is possible and eventually tell me (us) how?

Thank you very much and best regards,
Lúcio

Answer
Hi Lúcio,

It's very strange that the drive worked for only one diskette, and then quit. It certainly sounds like it needs replacing, and if at all possible, that's what I'd suggest, though the fact that Vesalia is not answering your question is not a good sign (it has happened all too often with Amiga dealers). :(

While it is possible to read standard 720KB PC diskettes on any standard Amiga floppy drive (with the right software), the opposite is not possible (hooking up an Amiga floppy drive to a PC and read/write files with it) without special third party hardware/software interfacing between it.

What you could try is buying another good used floppy drive from ebay.com--it would likely be cheaper, and as long as you buy from someone who has solid feedback, you would probably risk less than trying to deal with Vesalia.

I hope this helps!

Greg