Troubleshooting FAQ

• General
• OLED Displays
• Commodore Amiga
• Raw Images (IMG/IMA)
• Image Formats

General

• My Gotek will only display 'F-F'

  • This is the default display if a valid USB stick is not inserted. If you have inserted a stick then either FlashFloppy does not recognise it (try another stick) or the stick is not suitably formatted -- be sure that the stick is legacy partitioned (MBR rather than GPT), and FAT32 formatted.

• My Gotek will only display 'FlashFloppy' and version number

  • This is equivalent to the above problem, but with an LCD/OLED display. See answer above.

• My Gotek will only display 'UPD'

  • FlashFloppy is stuck in its update bootloader. This is usually because you have a short from jumper JA to ground. Check that jumpers are installed correctly at the rear of the Gotek. Also check the underside of the Gotek PCB for shorts (eg. solder blobs).

• My Gotek will only display 'FF Update Flash'

  • This is equivalent to the above problem, but with an LCD/OLED display. See answer above.

• My Gotek does not recognise any USB stick that I insert, and then afterwards they all fail to work even in a PC

  • You are feeding more than 5 volts power to the Gotek, and frying all your USB sticks! This is commonly because either the connector is inserted upside down, or because of a non-standard connector (eg Amstrad CPC, Spectrum +3). Either way you fed 12 volts to the Gotek. It usually survives, but USB sticks are instantly killed.

OLED Displays

• My OLED display shows garbage
  

  • Up to firmware v2.3a, you need one of the following lines in FF.CFG:

  display-type=oled-128x32-sh1106
  display-type=oled-128x64-sh1106
  

  • From v2.3a the display controller is auto-detected, and this is no longer needed. However, if your display is 128x64 then this must still be explicitly configured, or your display may be misaligned or display only every other row: display-type=oled-128x64.

• My OLED display illuminates only every other row
  

  • You have a 128x64 OLED display, which by default is driven as 128x32. You must explicitly configure the display size in FF.CFG: display-type=oled-128x64.

• My OLED display shows a vertical bar at the left or right side
  

  • Make sure the display size (128x32 or 128x64) is correctly configured in FF.CFG.
  • Try the latest firmwares in both the stable and experimental release series.
  • If either or both of the latest firmwares do not display correctly, raise a ticket on the issue tracker, or raise a question on the Facebook group.

Commodore Amiga

• I installed a Gotek in my A1200 but it will not recognise any floppy images

  • Assuming your Gotek is properly jumpered (S0 only) then this is usually because you have an Escom motherboard. Please check out this informative Youtube video.

• I installed a Gotek as external drive, but I cannot read from it

  • If you have Kickstart v2 or later, try booting Workbench from the Gotek. Or if you have a DF0/DF1 switch, select the Gotek as DF0 and try booting any bootable disk. If the Gotek fails to boot, but succeeds if you unplug the internal drive, then it's probably a PC drive that has been hacked to work with Amiga: Check the drive's circuit board around the 34-pin header to see if it has been modified (in particular, whether pins 30 and 34 are wired together). If so, this modification does not support multiple drives and you must remove the hack or replace it with a germanium diode (cathode to pin 30).

• The AUTOBOOT file selector does not recognise my Gotek drive

  • First please make sure you are running latest firmware and AUTOBOOT (both are included in the latest release). If the problem persists then the drive's READY signal is probably not reaching the Amiga. You can test this by booting SysTest, running the floppy read test, and check for the "no READY signal" warning. In this case either your ribbon cable is worn out, or you have an Escom board in need of further modding (check out the additional jumper wire in this Youtube video).

Raw Images (IMG/IMA)

• Images work but are much slower than a real floppy drive (half speed or worse)

  • The host probably expects sectors to be interleaved (non-sequential) within a track, and/or to be skewed (sector 1 at a variable offset) across tracks. Interleave and skew can be adjusted via a custom track layout in IMG.CFG.

• In IMG.CFG, how do I work out what interleave and skew values to use?

  • Many systems require neither and you can use the default 0 values. If your disk accesses are very slow (see previous question) then try adjusting cskew incrementally until you see a performance increase. Then repeat for interleave. A very few systems require sskew too, but this is rare. If you have access to an HFE image that works at correct speed, you can check for interleave and skew in the Track-Analyser visualiser in the HxC software suite for Mac and Windows.

Image Formats

• Can you support IMD images?

  • Unfortunately IMD is an archive format which is not convenient for directly accessing specific tracks or sectors, as required by FlashFloppy (IMD files are expected to be read sequentially, from start to finish). Hence support is unlikely to ever materialise. Straightforward images can be converted to IMG format. Trickier images should be converted to HFE.

• Can you support compressed images?

  • Compressed files are not convenient for fast random access, nor for writes. Generally they are intended for archiving rather than emulation.

• Can you support DMS/ADZ/...?

  • No. See above.