ACA1221 Fitted Now no boot from CF HDD

[paul1981]

Have you tried resetting the Amiga with  'Left Amiga + Right Amiga + Ctrl' ? This might possibly make your CF card appear...who knows? Worth a try anyway.
After a reset (or power on), if you hold down both mouse buttons it takes you to the Amiga Early Startup Control menu.



If you select Boot Options, your CF hard drive partition(s) should appear on the list and is likely called DH0 (and DH1) along with DF0 (the floppy device). Try resetting with that key combination a few times if it still doesn't boot.
If you have 3.0 ROMS, there was an issue whereby the Amiga wouldn't wait long enough with hard drives than spun-up slow, and in that case you get sent to the purple tick screen because the Amiga wasn't aware of the hard drive and asks for a boot floppy (or PCMCIA). In this case a soft reset (as I mentioned) will make the drive appear (as it's spun-up by now).
Cutting pin 1 of the IDE cable was the fix in this case (or just reset once after each power on), but I wouldn't have thought this applies to a CF hard drive being as though it should be ready immediately. 3.1 ROMS wait longer for the hard drive to spin up (could be your black screen), so that was another fix. Another fix was to install a drive that spins up faster.
In your case, you're seeing a black screen. If you wait a minute, does it boot? More likely is that it's something in the Startup-Sequence that is causing the problem. Try going to the Amiga Early Startup Control and selecting 'Boot With No Startup-Sequence'. This should land you at an AmigaDOS prompt.

[paul1981]

@RSwipe CA

Can you get it to boot to the Workbench again (desktop) please. Then hold down the right mouse button to access the top left menu (Workbench) then select 'Execute Command'. In this box that appears type:

multiview s:startup-sequence
(if the above doesn't work, type 'sys:utilities/multiview s:startup-sequence' instead)

Then press return. This should display the first screen of this file. Can you take a photo of it for us? Then we'll be able to see what needs to be changed to add or amend the ACATune command. Might as well scroll down a bit too so I can check the rest of the file (you might need to take two or three photos depending on its length).

[paul1981]

@RSwipe CA

Do you have the ACA1221 or the 1221ec?

I think you have the 1221ec being as though you have Kickstart 3.0 and your Workbench shows 8MB of Fast RAM. If you had the ACA1221, then according to its wiki page, the card would only present 1MB of Fast RAM by default.

Can you confirm you have the 1221ec ?

As for that '-P' feature, this was a delay that could be added at startup with the ACATune tool, but it seems the ACA1221 and 1221ec doesn't use ACATune anymore, maybe none of the new cards do, I don't know. Seems it was replaced with ACA1221 tools, for the licensing options etc for your card.

As for your particular problem, let me ask you this... when the machine is powered off at the switch and you then turn it on (whilst holding down both mouse buttons), do your DH0-DH3 drives appear on the list? If so, are you saying it will only boot when you select DH0 but then afterwards it can be reset with A-A-CTRL and it boots fine every time?

The LoadModule command I see at the top of your startup-sequence will  cause a single reboot for the FIRST time it boots only (unless you power  off and on again). What this does is replace the rom based scsi.device  with a more up to date one from disk (which will handle larger drives  and partitions than 4GB). There's a small chance this could be an issue  (there are different versions and the right one should be used).

Let  me ask you, did you have your own 3.1 Workbench disk set? That card you  bought says it comes with an OEM 3.0 Workbench set. I was confused  because your startup-sequence says 'LITE 3.1' which I'm guessing means  you have Workbench 3.1 installed?