AmigaLove

Hi Guys,

any help with this would be VERY much appreciated.

Watch Video

Thanks
Ole

Your Amiga 500 is likely .5MB chip RAM and .5MB Fast (maybe in your trap door, there is a half-meg expansion board). It's possible to expand the A500 to 1mb or even 2mb chip, which is pretty cool.

The Expansion drawer is really only for rather special software drivers, none of which you would have on that machine.

If that external drive was working properly it should have done something when you inserted the disk. Do you hear your main floppy drive doing the repetitive "click" sound? That's normal. It's the drive always seeking a new disk when the drive is empty. If you don't hear that external drive making the click, she might be dead. Does that floppy have a brand name on it anywhere? It would be nice to get to the bottom of those switches.

Ah right, I vaguely remember getting the 512KB memory extension back in the day. So 512k basic setup from the A500 plus the 512kb extension adding up to the total memory. I will look into those further memory upgrades, sounds like a good idea.

As for the disk drive - I checked it again. Not a single word, label or sign on it. Really odd, must have been a super shitty white label one, haha. It does not make any sound, no clicking (the search sound), no light flashing and regardless of the position of the 2 switches at the back it does not affect the drive it seems. Looks like it might simply be dead.

My goal is to get a hard drive anyway, then I assume secondary external disk drives become more or less obsolete anyway.

Thanks
Ole

The original 512kb trapdoor expansion from back then?

That’s an Alarm Code Red.

That one has a deadly battery in there. Maybe the leakage has destroyed some parts of the board and that’s causing the floppy drive issue.

As the others have stated you probably have a trap door expansion. And yes, the Commodore branded A501 had a Varta rechargeable battery in it that are guaranteed to leak. The thing is the corrosion sometimes travels from the battery through the expansion header and straight into the Amiga.

However, most aftermarket 512k RAM modules that I am familiar with used coin cell batteries. They usually don't leak. I would take the cover off and look inside and see what you can see. If you see any green on any of the pins then you know you have some leakage. If the RAM expansion is a sealed unit with shielding it is probably the A501.

I have a couple different expansion RAMS and currently no A501s since most of those are toasted.

As for the floppy it could be a couple of things. It could be the switch settings. Try different positions and then power off and on again. Sometimes they don't work until you do. One could be a power and one could be a drive number switch. Hard to say. If you can take it apart you might be able to find some identifying information. Since your internal floppy works I would be inclined to believe that it is a problem with the drive itself. The mechanism could be bad too. Especially true if it happens to be an EPSON model. I have seen more of those and Panasonic drives stop working than any other brands.