At last, I got me an A3000!!

[Will-i-am]

I just got what looks like an A3000 from ebay... and "as-is" doorstop so far. Here's a question for all you wise A3000 owners: my machine says it's a ver 9.03 so that's good, but so far if I turn it on the floppy light goes on and stays on and nothing else happens. Can't boot from floppy, no noises but an occasional click from the HD.... I tried another scsi HD and it does the same thing. I tried various FDs and I tried disconnecting the HD and booting from a floppy. How do I find out if the mobo is shot or have I already determined that and just don't know it? AND if the mobo is shot how rare is a working one out there? Thanks. Congrats on your working A3000! Maybe someday I'll have one too.

[Will-i-am]

jiffydos wrote:
You can install an A3640 in an A3000... but they did not come with one.

Sounds like his machine is never even booting kickstart.

I'd say to start with making sure that ALL your chips are seated correctly, especially the kickstart roms in the right hand corner.

Also, try holding down both mouse buttons as your turn the unit on.  This should give you a diagnostic/boot screen.  If not, something is likely hardware wrong.

kinda hate to jump in with this prob, but it was slightly on topic and maybe some other A3000 newbie will learn something. First I need a source for the jumpers and especially their location. I got zero manuals with this puppy. I have taken it down to the frame and reassembled it and with or without both mouse buttons pressed we get zip, nada nothing on screen. Bad sign, eh, except for the slight clicking sound from the HD makes me wonder what is it trying to do? I plan to open one of my a2000's, the one with 2.1 os and try swapping HDs as it looks from the software that came with it that it was running that OS. The battery is slightly fuzzy on one end. I guess I should check that out. I have a spare, although it is soldered.... Somebody messed with the covers on the daughterboard slots... that is there is a very odd cob job on one of the covers with part of a cover from what looks like an a2000 video slot cut in half and bolted to the normal slot cover only overlapping into the bay... real piece of work, I could do better with a chisel and piece of 16 ga steel. I replaced it. Lots of games, mostly war games like Falcon and A10 Tank Killer etc.... one paint program, Digipaint III. Odd. I really can't justify spending much more on my collection but I'd really like to get a working a3000! Anybody want to swap various hardware items for a working mobo if my efforts bottom out? Supergen, DCTV, Megalosound....? sigh..... :-? gee, did somebody HERE sell a broken a3000 on ebay real recently? I hope not.

[Will-i-am]

I moved my problems to another thread so the original question here can be worked on. But thanks tons for the tech references and suggestions. If I get a wide angle lens for my Olympus I will post a pic of my lab here with all these crazy computers.  It's hard to believe that my sweety-pie wife would allow me to continue to buy this stuff but although she is a windoze girl, she appreciates my love of Amigas.