exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hi,

I'm hoping someone can help me to diagnose the faults & ultimately repair my Falcon.

It's just come out of storage & it boots up & passes the memory test OK but the internal 65 meg Conner hard drive appears to spin up but didn't appear on the desktop. even worse is that the internal floppy doesn't appear to work & nor does a Gotek with HxC when plugged in instead of the floppy.

Any ideas/suggestions on where to start diagnosing or fixing the problems?

I may be able to wire up an external SCSI hard drive...but will I need a driver installed to access this? If so, I'll have to sort the floppy issue out first

Regards,
Jez

I would start by re-capping your PSU..

Clean the floppy drive heads.. Try a differnet floppy drive..

You will need to get the floppy working to boot HDD software to diagnose your HDD..

WIth the HxC Gotek, have you set the jumper ID correctly to ID 0? If the jumper ID is wrong, drive A will not appear.

HI,

First of all thanks for the suggestions - and sorry it's taken so long to get around to trying it. Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of our hobbies...

Anyway, I've made a little progress - disconnecting the internal Conner CP2064 HDD allows the original floppy to work OK (I managed to run an old version of sysinfo from it OK).

I'm going to try & find my SCSI 2 cable to plug in the 1 gig SCSI drive I had connected originally (and hope that still works) & put some drivers on a floppy to support it. I also hope to find one of the Falcon to ST or VGA adaptors I had originally - the picture on TV via the modulator is pretty naff!

Can anybody suggest/point me to some suitable drivers? I have oldish versions of HD Driver & ICD software (for my STs) but I don;' know if they would work on the Falcon. I've seen the comment about CECILE so I will give that a go anyway.
I will try & boot up one of the STs to see what s/w versions I have...then I can hopefully find something suitable (I think HD Driver is still available/supported, so if I can find the license number then I can possibly upgrade that).

Once I've got the old girl flying once more I'll see what the available budget is for replacing the internal drive...maybe a CF adaptor?

Best regards,
Jez

HD10 has a demo which works on the falcon..

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewt ... ?f=25&t=31


I use a IDE to CF adapter in mine.

HD Driver, if it's something at least remotely recent (>= 7.x) will definitely work on Falcon.

The Gotek should start fine without a HDD, as long as it has a suitable USB stick with the necessary autoboot.hfe file installed, and the boot disk on the display is set to 0 and not one of the other slots.

BTW I am assuming the Gotek has HxC firmware, and the autoboot.hfe file will run on a Falcon here, I don't own a Falcon but that's the way my Gotek goes on my STE.