A4000D not recognizing floppy

Hi

I'm currently rebuilding an A4000D from bits & pieces I got.
Its an 030/25Mhz unit, all capacitors in the PSU & motherboard have been replaced.

It boots fine from HDD, but wont boot from floppy (I do see the drive light up & do a short spin).
On the desktop, it shows as "DF0: ???" no matter if there's a disk in or not.
There is also no "click" sounds from the drive, at all.

I thought the drive is at fault but it behaves the same with another drive which works in my A1200.
Also tried a different floppy cable, same results.

Am I looking at a bad floppy controller? :help:
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

What a coincidence, this just happened to me when I took mine apart and put it back together. The problem for me ended up being that the cable bent some of the pins and some of the pins are either touching or not lined up in the plug correctly. I know it is not flipped the wrong way because the activity light would stay on and it would not even acknowledge a floppy in the drive. So you have the cable correct but check the pins.

Other than that...I could not tell you if a bad controller would cause this.

The floppy drive in my A1200 also acted weird, when I disassembled and reassembled it. Turned out that the cable was at fault. I think you might want to give a new floppy cable a shot.

Edit: Sorry, it seems you already tried that.

Just adding to the list of suggestions..

I would first check if it clicks in the rom screen by disabling the hard disk.

If it doesn't I would guess bad floppy drive, or as suggested faulty cable. You can build from a pc floppy drive a perfect DD drive, can post instructions.

(however it is alover the net, so you might just an already "almost" compatible one)

If it clicks in the rom screen, then noclick is installed in workbench probably, and I would clean the heads of the floppy drive with alcohol.

Thanx for all the suggestions!

@jvdbossc:

There are no clicks even without the HDD, tried two drives & two different cables.
I just verified both drives work fine in my A1200, so it looks more & more like a motherboard issue :(

Are there any jumpers on the board that can cause this behavior?
As far as I can tell, the board works perfectly in all other aspects.

Can't help you further don't think there will be any jumpers on the motherboard. The A4000 is also kind of new to me, but on other amiga's they are all on the flops themselves..

Quite sure some more advanced user will pick up this thread ;)

Can't think of any other obvious other reason :blink:

Well of course you suggested already one :thumbsdown: :Doh:

Anyone ??

You could have a blown CIA chip. They are to the rear of the board next to the PSU. If they are surface mounted, it would require someone with competent desoldering & soldering skilz. If they are socketed, it's just a case of flipping the old ones out & installing the new ones. For the life in me, I can't remember which one is responsible for addressing the Floppy. :shrug:

The chips are marked CIA ODD and CIA EVEN.

Kin

@Kin:

Is one of the CIAs responsible only for the floppy?
I'm hoping there are other symptoms I can check for, to verify if the problem is indeed CIA related.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by UberFreak

@Kin:

Is one of the CIAs responsible only for the floppy?
I'm hoping there are other symptoms I can check for, to verify if the problem is indeed CIA related.

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If the CIAs are socketed, you can easily test them by swapping them with each other. If one of the CIAs is faulty and you swap them, then something else will stop working and your floppy disk drive should start to click.

Edit: Based on bboah.com, it seems that both B and C revisions of the A4000 mobo have soldered CIAs.

Yes, unfortunately the CIAs are not socketed & they are also the PLCC type, for which I have no spares or tools to remove them.

Is there a diagnostic software that can test the CIAs?
I remember having something like this for the C64 so maybe there's something similar for the Amiga.