Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!iuvax!mailrus!uunet!motcid!king
From: king@motcid.UUCP (Steven King)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: Another sick Amiga
Keywords: Floppy
Message-ID: <1803@grape3.UUCP>
Date: 21 Mar 90 20:55:06 GMT
References: <946@ns-mx.uiowa.edu> <1990Mar16.161433.14948@mentor.com>
Organization: Motorola Inc. - Cellular Infrastructure Div., Arlington Heights, IL 60004
Lines: 36

In article <1990Mar16.161433.14948@mentor.com> krentz@mntgfx.UUCP (Ken Rentz) writes:
>I have an Amiga 500 (aprox. 2 years old, purchased used), that just lost
>it's floppy drive.  I just hooked up an Avatex modem, and within 5 minutes
>(before I even had a chance to try to use the modem), I was informed that
>the boot disk was bad.  After rebooting, there was no response from the
>drive at all.  The drive light lights up on reset but there is no gronking
>or clicking, and the requestor hand is all that will appear on the screen.
>
>I was told when I purchased the modem that the 500 uses a standard serial cable.
>This seems true since the modem doesn't use the pins the Amiga wants to put
>power out on.  Still the timing of the failure seems strange.

The 500 does indeed uses standard serial cables, provided that the (non-
standard) power output pins it has don't interfere with your modem.  You've
already checked this, so I don't think it's a problem.

Here's a really stupid thing to check (the stupid things are always what
we check last, no? :-)  While plugging the modem cable into the Amiga's
serial port, did you hit the disk drive cable?  I recently had a problem
where my 500 wouldn't recognize either my internal or external floppy drive.
(I've got a hard drive, so I may have had that condition for nearly
a week before I noticed it! :-)  Anyway, it turns out that at some point
I had been playing with the back of the thing and had jostled the external
drive cable.  The two drives seem to be tied together in such a way that
a poor connection on the external can render the internal drive unusable
as well.

Try re-seating the external drive cable.  If that doesn't work, try
re-seating all the cables just for the heck of it.  And naturally, try
removing the modem cable and see if the problem goes away.

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