Catweasel online manual for the Amiga versions

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Connecting diskdrives

The Catweasel controller uses standard PC-diskdrives, it's not necessary to buy expensive Amiga-HD diskdrives. Unfortunately, there are very low-quality diskdrives on the PC market. These drives are only capable of reading data (installing drivers), but if you want to write to a disk, they just fail. The tracks that have been written by these drives normally loose all data, and need to be re-formatted by a better drive.

The Catweasel MK2 has been successfully tested with drives by Teac, Panasonic, Chinon, Sony, Namki, Sanyo, Sankyo, NEC, Epson and Control Data. During our tests, the TEAC drives have convinced us with good results even when using bad disks.

Caution:
Due to our tests, we can't guarantee the proper function with Mitsumi diskdrives. This applies to both, 3,5 inch and 5,25 inch drives. However, we can't completely exclude proper function.

Use the floppy-cable that's shipped with the controller for connecting the diskdrives. It's different from Amiga floppy cables, because it uses a certain standard to twist some wires that's different from the "twist" in the Amiga-cables. Being compatible to this standard, you'll find spare parts or longer cables much easier and cheaper.

The cable has got five connectors:

3,5"-----------------------------------3,5"---5,25"-----x------3,5"----5,25"

 A                                      B      C        D       E       F

Please mind that you can only connect one drive as unit 0. Physically it's possible to connect a 3,5" drive to B and a 5,25" drive to C, but the Catweasel will fail in this configuration. The same applies to connectors E and F.

This document © Copyright 2000 Jens Schönfeld, individual Computers.