Expert: Gregory Donner - 11/19/2004

Question
I have an A500+ which seems not to want to read floppy disks. The computer switches on normally and you get the insert disk Kickstart screen, you insert a disk, the screen goes white and the floppy whirrs, then after a few seconds the kickstart screen comes back as if the disk wasnt bootable. I have tried the disk on another Amiga without problems. any ideas?

Answer
Hi David,

The fact that the disk works fine in another Amiga makes me think that your floppy drive is either bad, or misaligned (most likely bad). It's rare that floppy drives are misaligned, and judging by the age of Amiga 500's (almost 20 years old), it's not uncommon for the floppy drives to be bad.

You could buy an external floppy drive that you can use to boot up with (the easiest solution), or possibly a replacement internal drive from ebay.com (www.ebay.com), Software Hut (www.softhut.com), or also Centsible Software (www.centsible.com). One of these stores should have what you're looking for. I'm not familiar with current pricing, but I wouldn't expect a drive to be more then $20 or $30 dollars.

I hope this helps!

Greg