You may see this post on other Amiga communities as I am trying to get as much reach as possible.
Hi, Looking for any assistance. Recently I have been helping my brother prep his Amiga 2000 system for sale. He bought his system and cards to learn and produce some 3D animations in the late 80's/early 90s. The system sat in closet for a long time - when taken out, the battery was bad and he removed it, cleaned the mobo and inspected the traces, no apparent damage but the CPU socket was not removed.
While inventorying and testing the system, he said the system had been up for a few hours when the main screen went black while he had his back turned. Through trying different things he found the system is always bootable when the 68060 accelerator card is removed but just gets a black screen otherwise. Thinking it might be an issue with the accelerator, he tried swapping out his DKB 68060 for his Fusion 40. This accelerator gets a black screen as well but does occasionally exhibit some other strange behavior (which I will describe further).
At this point my assumption is it might be related to a) no battery if the either card requires it to be present or b) some component on the motherboard is marginal. Most of my retro experience has been with Apple II related gear (a2retro is my handle in Apple II communities) and my brother is trying to recall things from 30 years ago but was never into the hardware aspects that much. Any suggestions on how to start trouble shooting this?
Additional Information
1. So with either accelerator removed, the system will boot off the ide or floppy drives with no issues. Personally I have not tried the 060 but have been working with the F40 as it has a switch on the back so you can turn it off without having to remove the card.
2. Occasionally the F40 does show a startup screen but it looks like the card may be resetting it self over and over. See video -
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AnvZALa2ne9bgoduQKIB6v--QQMxpg?e=y0CuId3. The other way i have been getting the system to actually boot is to set the F40 switch to the off position. Boot as normal. Power off the system. Flip the F40 switch and then power the Amiga back up. Sometimes when I do that I eventually get a red error message about a software error, it times out and the boot proceeds. The work bench comes up and using sysinfo I can see the 68040 is active but both the MMU and FPU are not active.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AnvZALa2ne9bgodsusrLY_eCkDeicw?e=y0LHVQhttps://1drv.ms/i/s!AnvZALa2ne9bgodt2NF5dwsfqb__Ow?e=A80Bf5Glenn
