exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hello All. I"m really hoping someone can shed some light on why I'm having so much trouble getting my Gotek floppy drive emulator to work with my 520ST. Here are all the details.

--The Gotek was flashed per the guide on this forum. Its on Flash Floppy FW 2.14 and I've placed a copy of the AUTOBOOT.HFE and HXCSDFE.CFG into the root of my FAT32 Formatted flash drive. A few folders containing games where placed here as well.
-- The jumpers on the Gotek are set to SO nothing else. I have also tried SO and MO.
-- The Gotek is housed with an original SF354 External Floppy case. It receives it's power and connects to the Atari in this manner.
-- When I fire up the Gotek it eventually shows 000. I fired up the Atari and see that HxC is loading but I always see 2 bombs nearly immediately.

Have I missed something crucial? It's been 3 days and I'm going crazy trying to resolve this issue. I've now formatted 3 different flash drives and copied the AUTOBOOT.HFE and HXCSDFE.CFG over. Does anyone else out there successfully run a setup like mine? Does my trouble stem from having an external floppy drive as my only option? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

There are two different controller boards for the SF354. Which do you have? One have a few logic chip on it and the other one it's just a pcb with traces on it (and two relay).

The one with logic chips on it won't work out of the box. The other one should work fine with double sided disks. The ribbon cable need to be flipped upside down also. AUTOBOOT.HFE and HXCSDFE.CFG is in root on USB stick?

Could also be bad connection. Bad solder or corrosion so it's not connected to the chip in the ST from the floppy connector.

It was probably my guide you used, so I hope you found it useful :)

I've personally only tried a Gotek externally using a harness borrowed from an external Cumana drive. It was simply a 14 pin DIN floppy cable that went straight to the 34 pin connector of the Gotek. Essentially connected direct to the FDC.

This worked fine, but the SF354 was a single sided external drive, so if you have the adaptor board with logic etc, as @DoG says, that probably isn't going to work, as it will presume a single sided floppy is in place.

The other problem you may encounter, is that not all USB sticks work, and though I see you've tried different USB sticks, you will probably find that sizes over 32GB won't work either, so try a smaller one if you've not already done so. Also, if you boot with no USB stick installed, or an empty one, do you get to the desktop and do you see floppy icons.

I have a 128GB usb stick on my Gotek so doubt that`s the problem but as you say I think they can be fussy about the USB type.

Fonzie wrote: 05 Jan 2020 13:58 I have a 128GB usb stick on my Gotek so doubt that`s the problem but as you say I think they can be fussy about the USB type.

Did you mean 128MB or 128GB? AFAIK the limit for Gotek is 32GB, so if you did mean 128GB, then it's unlikely to work. Try a smaller size.

To be exact its a "SanDisk SDCZ48-128G-U46 Ultra USB Flash Drive USB 3.0 Up to 100 MB/s - Black, 128GB"
That one works perfectly.