Amiga 2000 Boot Sequence Q

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Obvious first question, have you removed the battery?  Any motherboard damage?  Also have you reseated all the custom chips?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Yes to the battery, no serious mb damage I can see but I'm still evaluating that, and yes I've reseated them all.  It seems you might know the answer to one of my questions, namely, what is a "custom chip"? Am I right that anything with the MOS/CSG moniker is a custom chip?

I would look carefully around the battery area, especially around & under the CPU socket area.

Re: "custom chips", that generally refers to the Amiga's custom chipset (Agnus, Paula, Denise).  The Agnus is the big square one right in the middle, and is especially prone to needing to be reseated in A500's (google the story about the speedbump the trucks would go over when leaving the C= factory).  But yes, that is kind of a generic term that could describe a lot of things.

But I'd start with every socketed chip - press down firmly on them, inspect their pins, etc.  Also what version ROM do you have in here?  Do you have a spare you could swap in?  A bit scatter-brained today, just thinking out-loud of other common problems.  When was the last time this system worked?  Have you tried with any/all expansion cards removed and devices disconnected?

Edit: this link has lots of info on Amiga custom chips:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Chip_Set
and this one:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_custom_chips

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Maybe I missed it, but does the system respond in any other way?  Hard drive activity light, does the floppy drive spin if you have a disk in the drive, etc.?  And yes, +1 to everything Mechy says.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Probably a dumb question, since I'm all for resurrecting old Amiga hardware, but are you particularly fond of this 4.4 board?  IMHO Rev. 6 and later boards are a much better design.  You can see more about the differences here:  http://amiga.resource.cx/mod/a2000.html

Assuming everything else works (drives, etc.), maybe swap in a different board to ease your headache?  Probably a bad idea though, since 2000's are tanks, and almost always can be fixed.  

Your testing process seems sound.  Off-hand I think you should still get an "Insert Workbench" screen, even if no floppy attached, but I would hook up a floppy drive in any case, just to see if it spins.  If the drive spins and it acts like it's trying to boot then your problem may be somewhere in the video output.  If it doesn't even try to access the disk, your problem is at a lower level.

I did a little poking around and maybe this guide might be helpful to you?

http://home.arcor.de/kickstart/TKA/Tutorials/troubleshooter/trouble1.html

http://home.arcor.de/kickstart/TKA/Tutorials/troubleshooter/trouble2.html

It's a bit old, but the second link in particular, lists some components that might be checked.

---I wish I was in Austin!  Was supposed to go down there for a tech conference last summer, but had to cancel because my workload was too high.  HR tells me I have 296 hours of vacation time at my main job and I can't take a bit of it because of too much work.  Darn Americans and our workaholic tendencies.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Fixed.  Thanks everyone for your awesome advice!

Excellent! What was the issue? We're we even close?