Troubleshooting my Atari Falcon

[kgilmore]

Inspired by my purchase of a Mega ST 4, I dug out my old Atari Falcon (4M, TOS 4.02) bought new which hasn’t been used for a number of years. It boots, passes the memory test, but no longer recognises the internal hard drive or the floppy drive. I’ve replaced the floppy drive with a new one so I don’t think that’s the problem. The machine works in that I can change resolution, but not being able to read floppy or hard drives is obviously a big problem.

On balance, what would be the most likely areas to have gone wrong, and would they be amenable for repair to someone with a strong hobbyist background, has an electronics engineering degree (haven’t worked in engineering for over a quarter of a century), but knows his limitations with SMD devices? Given that Falcons are unobtainium or stupidly priced on eBay, I definitely want the machine running again so I can upgrade it and get into 68030 / 56001 programming.

[mikro]

First start with disconnecting the IDE drive, then reboot again and check the floppy drive.

[alexh]

The Falcon floppy disk drive controller shares the IRQ with the IDE and from experience I know the floppy drive can appear to not work if there is a broken IDE drive connected.

https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=18840

Remove the broken IDE drive and there is a high probability the floppy drive will work again.

You can replace IDE drive with a 44-pin DOM that plugs directly into the motherboard. Or an IDE->SD adapter for external access.