Restoring Amiga 3000T - Part 4 - Floppy Disks


After HD replacement, It’s time to reinstall AmigaOS.

Booting from “Amiga Install Disk” floppy….. DF0 makes a bad sound and is not able to read floppy.
OK, disconnect DF0 cable and turn DF1 as DF0 (DF1 is newer than DF0, I bought it after Commodore bankruptcy to have an emergency working removable devices).
Booting again from “Install Disk” floppy….. Amiga starts reading floppy but after a while it returns “bad block” errors…. floppy is corrupted.

What can I do?

I can try to find working floppies… (NAAAAHH!) or replace floppy with an sd/usb adapter.
As for hard disk, you can find expensive “floppy emulator” devices or… The Gotek floppy.
The Gotek floppy is a cheap PC floppy emulator; it has a standard floppy connector to communicate to the motherboard and an usb port for usb storage devices. Putting floppy image files on usb pendrive, the Gotek is able to read images data as a real floppy.

Hervé Messinger, wrote a new firmware for this device to read Amiga floppy image files (.adf)
https://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/

I bought a new Gotek floppy on ebay for 20€ and after some problems, I was able to flash it with the H.M. firmware. The problems were related to my usb-serial adapter, a cheap undocumented pins device…

Only for Amiga 3000/3000T users: the Amiga front bezel is not compatible with many floppy drives. I dont’ want to cut a rectangle window on Amiga front bezel to allow access to Gotek floppy usb port, display and buttons; I’m still thinking to an adapter to mount the floppy in the right way in the case or to disassemble Gotek floppy and mount its board in a some kind of chassis adapter.



It’s time to reinstall AmigaOS!

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