exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hi all,
I have a FALCON030 which boots only on ROM and does not allow access to the internal DD nor to the floppy disk drive!
once the desktop is displayed I see the icons of drives A and B but nothing helps whether I put a floppy disk with data or try to format a blank floppy disk, it is impossible to access the drive.
i've tried to replace the floppy disk but it's the same.
it seems that all IDE access are disabled :-(
does anyone have an idea???
thank you in advance for your help
Yann
PS : Sorry for my english, I'm from Britany ;-)

You will need to provide more information than that.

What does it mean that "all IDE access are disabled" ?

How "impossible" is to access floppy disk?

Is there any error shown? What hard disk driver do you use? Does SCSI work? Etc...

here some information :

on screen A and B icons are displayed on desktop

after inserting an already formatted floppy double click on A (or B) icon the floppy driver led lightup
but after some second the following message is displayed :
drive A: not responding
check drive or insert floppy disk

of course i've tried this with more that 20 different floppy disk :-(

and when trying to format a floppy this message is displayed :
an error occurred while formatting or copying
the diskette may be protected or unusable

PS: messages are translated from French Rom version Falcon

concerning IDE HDD there is no C nor further D,E,... Icon present on desktop !

and of course no way to execute HDDriver without floppy drive

It sounds like the computer is trying to access the floppy disk. A couple of things to try:

1 - Replace the floppy with a known working one. I think the falcon drive is the same as a standard PC one (please correct me if I'm wrong here)
2 - clean the read and write heads with a cotton bud and IPA

need to find another floppy drive, but not sure to find one easily!
so I'll try to clean floppy drive heads in a few days, but can you tell me what is IPA ? ;-)

IPA = IsoPropyl Alcohol

coonsgm wrote: 29 Sep 2022 21:09 1 - Replace the floppy with a known working one. I think the falcon drive is the same as a standard PC one (please correct me if I'm wrong here)

Yes.. But you have to change the drive ID. Its why I only generally recommend Sony mpf drives are they are simple to do and well documented.

But it begs the question as well., is the drive original or has someone already swapped it ?

Hi, all
after cleaning the Floppy drive head the drive seems to operate correctly.
for the HDD drive i've replaced it with an IDE Compact Flash drive once the floppy was running. to initialize it with HDDriver 11.12 from floppy disk.
everything seeems to be OK now. :)
meanwhile ASAP I'll recap the PSU and install the clock patch from Exxos

Before you fit the clock patch run the tests to see if you actually need it in the first place. My machine didn’t.

exxos wrote: 29 Sep 2022 23:42

coonsgm wrote: 29 Sep 2022 21:09 1 - Replace the floppy with a known working one. I think the falcon drive is the same as a standard PC one (please correct me if I'm wrong here)

Yes.. But you have to change the drive ID. Its why I only generally recommend Sony mpf drives are they are simple to do and well documented.

But it begs the question as well., is the drive original or has someone already swapped it ?

I have found a Sony MPF 920 and I'll swap the original floppy with this one after modifying the sel0/sel1 strap.
the floppy in my Falcon is the original one when I bought it in 1993 !