How to get two external drives to work with 520STM?

[bfollowell]

OK, I'm checking out my ST drives and trying to confirm read/write operation. I have three external drives; two SF314s and a Golden Image 3A-1D. I have two drive cables. Using them singly, I've verified both cables seem good and all three drives read and will boot the system. However, whenever I try to connect two drives, I can never seem to get the second one recognized. I have the drive cable going from the back of the ST to the in port on drive A, and the second drive cable going from drive A's out port to drive B's in port. I seems pretty straight forward and I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, but I can't seem to get the system to recognize that I have two drives.

 

I have Floppy A and Floppy B icons on the desktop whether I have a drive hooked up or not. When I boot, double-clicking on Floppy A will show me whatever is in Drive A. Double-clicking on Floppy B brings up a dialog box that says Please insert disk B into drive A.

 

Am I doing something wrong or is there something wrong with my system?

 

Thanks.

 

[anzac]

You have to “mount” drive B as a real drive and not A being used as B with floppy switching 

 

similar to adding hard drives and addressing them mounting the respective partitions and assigning drive letters 

[bfollowell]

OK, well, at least, hopefully, there's nothing wrong with the drive or my computer. I'll look into that then. Thanks!

 

[bfollowell]

Well, I've spent the last half-hour Googling and can't seem to find much of anything about adding a second floppy drive to an ST. The one thing that I did manage to find contradicted what anzac said and said that everything to recognize the second drive was built into the ST and all you had to do was boot with the two drives, or an internal and an external connected properly and everything would work. That isn't what I am seeing. Would someone please tell me how to properly mount a second external drive as Floppy B on my 520STM? If there's an online resource related to this, please point me in the right direction.

 

I should also mention that this 520STM has original TOS 1.0

 

Thanks.

 

[bfollowell]

After some more investigation and speaking with some others, I don't believe that we have to mount a second floppy drive. When connected, the second floppy drive should just work. We don't have to do anything. Just connect it up properly and the machine picks up the second drive.

 

I played around with my drives and my cables, swapping things around, and I finally believe I have a bad cable. I have one cable that shows no drives. When I boot with any of my "real" drives connected using that cable, the 520 boots and no floppy icons are shown, so it isn't picking up the drives at all. Strangely enough, if I put a Gotek in any of those drives and boot with that same cable, the system recognizes the Gotek as drive A and the system boots fine. I have no idea why that cable would work with a Gotek, but not with a real Atari drive, but it definitely seems like some sort of cabling issue.

I'll have to order a new cable and check things out again.

Thanks again for your help.

[anzac]

I stand corrected.... I was talking from long back memory and might have mixed something 

 

was trying to help though

[bfollowell]

And I do appreciate it. Only the Golden Image drive seems to be reading and writing reliably, and that is the drive that I'd planned to keep. The other two I was planning to sell with two ST systems I plan to sell. I guess I'll put a Gotek in one and sell it with the 520STM.

 

Thanks again for trying to help.