Expert: Gregory Donner - 4/29/2009

Question
Hi - Yesterday I got Amiga 500 with no Floppy drive. Since I have Amiga 1200 in top condition I took disk drive from Amiga 1200 and put it in Amiga 500. Amiga 500 didn't work so I put floppy drive back in Amiga 1200. After that half of my disks cant be read. What happened ?

Answer
Hi Dejan,

If you're sure all of your diskettes are good, it's strange indeed that half of them suddenly stopped being readable after the drive swap, though it's possible it may be an alignment problem. However, it's not worth the two-way shipping and tech costs to send the drive in for repair.

Instead, I would recommend just buying a new internal Amiga 1200 floppy drive from either Software Hut (www.softhut.com) if you're in the USA, or AmigaKit (www.amigakit.com) if you're in the UK or Europe. You can also check on eBay.com for new and/or used floppy drives. Be sure to buy an Amiga 1200-specific internal drive though--if I recall correctly, Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200 floppy drives are different in that the Amiga 1200 drive can read and write high-density disks.

I hope this helps!

Greg