My Power Tower won't boot up...sometimes

[marcfrick2112]

Hello, I hope someone can help. My A1200 Power Tower started acting funny.... A couple of days ago, when I used ctrl-amiga-amiga to reboot, I had some disk act. for a short time....then just a black screen. Now it happened today on first turning on the power.... Any ideas? I heard what I thought was the P/S for my ext. SCSI (not SYS:) drive failing, could that keep the machine from booting? Maybe the PSU of the Amiga itself is failing?

Any help would be great...this is my best-spec Amiga, can not afford to lose it....

Specs: A1200 Power Tower with Blizzard 1260 (pre-assembled from Software Hut) 128MB Fast RAM, OS3.9 w/bb 1 and 2, 8.5 GB IDE HD, SCSI Zip, SCSI 2.1 HD....

[marcfrick2112]

Wow, weird, it seems to be working now.....

Umm, Matt H: I didn't change anything on the boot partition, software-wise, do you still think it could be a soft. problem? Any app/program you know that might cause this problem? My SYS: has been virtually unchanged for years.....

And, finally if the psu could be going....where would I find a replacement.... Is it standard?

Oh, Matt H, I forgot to mention, when I have this problem, the HD activity just goes out, and stays out... I thought that during validation the activity light would be on.....
Thanks eveyone for your (very fast) help...

[marcfrick2112]

ChaosLord wrote:
I have an A1200 Power Tower.
I had the same problem as you.

I will now tell you the top-secret trick to fix the problem.
Keep in mind that many brave knights died in battle to acquire this information and only the oldest, wisest and most powerful wizards know of the existence of this darque majix.

Ok

The secret is

...

Duct Tape.  I will wait here while you finish laughing.

...

...

The problem is that your 060 card is a teensy bit loose and it is not standing perfectly vertical.  It is leaning a bit to one side.  Open your A1200 PowerTower up and verify this.

When you see that it is a bit off, you can then point it straight up and down and tape it in place with duct tape.  If you are a very high level wizard with a high intelligence stat you may choose electrical tape instead.

If you think back carefully you will remember that somebody bumped your computer the day that this problem first started.  Perhaps they were reaching for something.  The bump knocked it off whack a bit.

Oh C***, yeah, should have thought of that.... I actually have a piece of thick plastic mounted with double-stick tape to 'push' the '060 card into the vertical position.... but had opened the amiga recently to install a DVD-R drive, then again to remove it ...

I dread opening up my miggy, but I will check to make sure the '060 card is in right.... thanks

[marcfrick2112]

@Framiga and ChaosLord: you seem to be right... I took out the '060 (shudder) and cleaned the contacts of the 1200 expansion slot as well as the connection between the 1230 SCSI module and the '060.... SO far everything is OK....

A question though.... when my Amiga had failed to boot, I heard for certain a hard drive powering down, but I had not yet turned off the power.... Could an accelerator not in place correctly do this? If say the SCSI module didn't make contact while the Amiga was on, could it prevent the Amiga from booting? I just want to do everything I can to keep my 'baby' running.....