Power XL Floppy

[Harrison]

How much did you pay for your one originally? I'm sure mine cost over £100 back in the day. I have the original box in the loft so may even still have the receipt with it.

BTW, Stu, that drive looks like it's been to the gulf war or something. What happened to it?

[StuKeith]

How much did you pay for your one originally? I'm sure mine cost over £100 back in the day. I have the original box in the loft so may even still have the receipt with it.

BTW, Stu, that drive looks like it's been to the gulf war or something. What happened to it?

Not sure, got it in a job lot of amiga stuff! Ive had it for over a year now and didnt even know it was one, was about to stick it on ebay and then noticed the logo!

Taken the case off to paint it, and the controller board says HDAmiga on the chip!

[AlexJ]

How much did you pay for your one originally? I'm sure mine cost over £100 back in the day. I have the original box in the loft so may even still have the receipt with it.

Not sure. It was a gift, and I didn't really have all that much of an idea about the concept of money at the time. I just saw it as the solution to me and my dad's problem of having to swap disks millions of times in order to start a race on Geoff Crammond's F1GP.

If I can find the advert, that might give a clue.

EDIT:And here we go:


Going slightly off-topic, how far away is the hardware section on the main site? It would be really useful to be able to start to catalogue these things for future reference.

[Harrison]

Well there we go. I thought it was around the £100 mark. Mad now to think I once paid that much for a floppy disk drive!

As for the Hardware section, I am still working on it, but hopefully it will be up and running in the next couple of months. I have some work to do on the main site code first and then some more on the hardware section templates, but that should only take a couple of days work at most. I will post more details closer to the time.

[Harrison]

Here are a couple of shots of my Power Computing XL drive, so you can all see the difference.

As you can see the drive looks very different to the one Stu has (and the one in the advert).

My drive pictured here was produced after the original plastic one and has a completely plain metal case, and you can also see that it also doesn't have the two switches on the back..

The original plastic one looks identical to my Power Computing 880B Floppy Drive, including the two switches on the back that are for selecting the built in X-Copy Cyclone compatible disk copying hardware. This was one reason I didn't think it was an XL drive as I don't think they have this copying hardware in them, just the 880B 880K models did.

[hacky]

Hello

I got a mysterious floppy drive from Ebay.

It was called "Blitzcopy floppy HD floppy" in the Ebay offer..


So I got the hardware and the drive is working as normal (DD) but I´m not able to use the hidden special features of this drive because I do not have the software "Blitzcopy".

Does anybody here knows something about this mystious Soft and Hardware ?

I´m really interested to try out the missing Blitzcopy software.

If someone could help me I would be very grateful.

Here are some picutures of the hardware.
The drive has an ON/OFF/Auto switch.

I got two driver disks from an other person for the Power Computing XL drive.
I tried the driver 1.32 and 1.3 but I was unable to read or write any HD disk.

So what do I have here ? Is it just a DD drive ?
Is the Auto switch really for Cyclone/X-copy ?
I thought there must be a software called Blitzcopy but I could not find it.







.

[Buleste]

Just noticed on the underside of the PCB it says Powerdrive which to me sounds as though it's just an extra floppy and cannot read/write HD floppies. Can't find any info on it so i may be wrong.

[Harrison]

It definitely looks like a Power Computing External floppy drive. The actual model of drive might be harder to work out though. To use the HD functionality of one of the Power XL drives I think you need to have the drivers installed and booting as part of the Workbench startup sequence. Anyone, please correct me if I'm wrong.

You said the drive came with the XL floppy disks. If needed the instructions and drivers should be on there. I think, but could also be wrong, that this will only work on a Workbench 3 or newer machine, such as an A1200.