Unfortunately these drives and the floppy disks they store their information on are not aging well.

In this post I will be installing a Gotek Floppy Emulator into an external 3.5 floppy drive case to solve this problem.

The Gotek basically stores images of floppy disks on a USB drive.

But I would prefer to have an original, physical floppy drive in my Amiga 500.

So I managed to get hold of an external slimline drive which has a supposedly working drive that is missing a front.

I need to replace the rubber feet and two of the screws so that they match.

The IPA was better at removing the remaining gunk from the rubber feet as well as cleaning the metal casing.

This might be because of the floppies ageing or the drive having a fault or a combination of both.

It probably needs a cleaning of both mechanical parts and the heads.

The internal drive exhibits similar problems so I will probably do both at the same time.

I could switch between the floppy images but the AmigaOS could not recognise the floppies.

When changing image, AmigaOS recognised the change but could not read the floppy image.

I am not sure that the JAJ5 jumper did anything but I removed it just in case.

Most external drives are setup such that the controller pcb handles the drive select pin but not all.

It could need a jumper at S1 or no jumper at all, so I tried both.

Removing the jumper from S0 did not make much of a change but setting it at S1 the internal drive seemed to lock up.

I noticed that with most of the floppy images the track display showed track no.

This is unusual as most Amiga floppies start by reading from Track 40.

I checked the USB drive root and here was two configuration files FF.CFG and HXCSDFE.CFG.

Rather than trying to figure what to change I decided to move the configuration files off the USB drive to another drive to preserve it.

I moved all of the files off the USB drive and moved just two floppy images back on the drive, a Workbench 1.3.3 and the matching Extras image.

As I rebooted the Amiga the internal drive still struggled reading the Workbench physical floppy but the Gotek drive worked beautifully.

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Amiga Gotek F-F