Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!uhnix1!sugar!ssd
From: ssd@sugar.UUCP (Scott Denham)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Second Floppy Drive
Message-ID: <1521@sugar.UUCP>
Date: 5 Mar 88 09:54:56 GMT
References: Just me! <7232@oberon.USC.EDU>
Distribution: na
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 32
Keywords: disk drive,write protect
Summary: Yes, maybe, but....

In article <7232@oberon.USC.EDU>, bishop@skat.usc.edu (Brian Bishop) writes:
 (truly tragic tale of destuction of write protect mechanism deleted) 
>   This is very annoying, since it is my second drive. Looking through the
> RKM, I see a pin on the interface labelled WPRO (14 - Asserted by selected,
> write-protected disk). 
> 
>   SO.......can I snip this pin, thereby making all disks writable? I would
> rather have that than what I have now. 
 
Well, I'm no expert, but I've fooled with some of the drive lines, and
I think that a) to be sure, you'd need to tie the line to +5v - I don't
know if there's a pull-up in there anyplace. b) If you do this, you will
not only permananly write-enable your second drive, but your first one 
as well!! Probably not a great idea, unless you never write protect disks
anyway. I think you could improvise by inverting the select line to the
drive and feeding it to the write protect - that way, you'd only affect
the selected drive. You could even go the whole picnic and add a switch -
a thought I'd had several times given the difficulty of flipping those
little tabs at 3 am. (I had in mind more of a permanant write protect,
though). 
     
> 
> 
> brian bishop
> 
> DISCLAIMER: Warranty? Haaahahahahahahahaha! What's a warranty?
> 
> have a nice day fnord.


   Scott Denham 
   warantees are just documents telling you when they expect it to break!