Expert: Gregory Donner - 5/8/2007

Question
QUESTION: Hi Greg. Just bought an a500 but some of my old disks have churned up the internal drive. Just read your answer re amiga drives. I didn't know you could buy an external dd and use it as the main drive. How can you configure the computer to do this? Many thanks Simon.
ANSWER: Hi Simon,

One nice about the Amiga is that it checks all connected floppy disk drives when booting up, so if you have an external disk drive connected, simply put your boot disk in, and the Amiga will boot up from there--no configuration needed at all.

I hope this helps!

Greg

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hello again Greg. I know I had an external drive with my old setup years ago and I'm sure it wouldn't let games boot up from the external dd. Are you saying it should have and there may have been a fault with either dd or machine? Cheers again Simon.

Answer
Hi Simon,

I would suspect that, yes--the Amiga shouldn't be particular which floppy drive it boots from, unless the game is badly written (i.e. coded to expect DF0:). Properly written games and software should run fine from any external floppy drive. If you suspect you may have a bad external floppy drive, you should be able to get new ones from places like amigakit.com or softhut.com.

Regards,

Greg