exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

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.

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

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.

Thank you both for your replies. The original 60 MB IDE drive was going to be junked anyway as it was way too tiny even back when I was using it in the mid-90s.

I’ve made some progress. After getting a white screen of death after removing the IDE drive and the 286 emulator board I had, I replaced everything and found that it would recognise and read some floppies. It would even display text files, but resolutely refused to run any programs, so I know the floppy port is working, though I suspect the drive itself will need a good clean, or replacement with a Gotek. There’s enough encouraging signs for me to order a 14Mb expansion, 68882, and TOS 4.04. Thanks again for the valuable help.