Amiga 1000 Not Booting to Workbench

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

Hello everyone,

Just rescued this Amiga 1000 from an old barn. It is in fairly rough shape, but it does turn on. The kickstart/workbench 1.2 disk was still in the drive. Although it is a copy, not an official disk.

The system turns on and reads the disk, but while loading I get halted at an error that says, "Can't open key file Comm.Keys".

The drive doesn't seem to be struggling to read the disk or anything. I figure the disk is corrupt and the file is missing.

Does anyone know for sure if that is what is going in, or could this error be the result of something different?

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

Yeah, I thought it was supposed to be 2 disks as well, however when it is booting the disk, it clearly says kickstart + workbench 1.2.

Today I did find a Supradrive 4x4 SCSI interface module in another box among computer stuff. Would it be possible that the disk is trying to get it to boot from an external drive? I'll have to look some more to see if I can find the second half of the Supradrive 4x4.

Also when booting without disk, I am greeted with the image to insert disk.

At this time, I am unable to type anything as they keyboard is in incredibly bad shape and I am in the process of repairing it. I have just finished desoldering the switches, and now have to service about half of them. I can show you pics if you want to see this horror.

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

Alright guys, I've got some horrifying pictures for you.



Amiga 1000 as found, not cleaned yet.




Inside the memory expansion bay there is an unknown module.




The boot disk found in the drive.




Starting the Amiga 1000 without disk in the drive, I am greeted with this screen.




Booting the Amiga 1000 with the boot disk found in the drive, I get this screen. This is where it halts for about 2 seconds.




This is the next screen I get while booting up the system. It hangs here indefinitely. Keyboard is not in functioning condition at the moment, so I cannot see if I can type at this point.




Amiga 1000 keyboard as found. Missing two key caps and has broken key cap receivers on both of them. Some keys frozen. Original cable not yet found.




Shell and key caps removed from the keyboard, showing the terrible condition that it is in. Multi-meter tests on switches for continuity show that most keys are not functional and need cleaning and repair.




A shot of the dirty PCB for the keyboard. Should clean up easy and hopefully the main IC is not damaged.




The worst frozen key switch I have looked at so far.




The switch opened to show the internals. Note the small piece of spring sitting in the bottom of the switch that has broken off.


And that is where I am at so far. I have not yet opened the computer, as I don't have the room on desk and need to use the kitchen table, which I only get small amounts of time with. I will post more pictures of the internals of the system when I can pull it apart.

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

Yes, I did in fact find it inside an old barn. The system and the keyboard were on the side of the barn that had a leaky roof, however it was on a shelf and under stuff, so how much rain water got in her over the years is questionable.

I went through the hundreds of disks on the other side of the barn that didn't have a leaky roof, and among them, I found these!



There were other Amiga software disks as well, but I just grabbed up the ones for booting and the Supradrive for now. Some of these disks are pretty dusty on the outside though so I have not put any of them in the system yet. Does anyone have any recommendations for dusting them off to minimize the amount of dust and dirt that gets into the drive? I have not pulled back the dust cover or anything on these so I don't damage them.

So far I have still not been able to locate the second half of the Supradrive, the mouse, or the keyboard cable. Will a standard RJ10 cable that goes from a phone receiver to the base work as the cable, or do they have a different wiring pattern that I will have to change? If that will work, and I can boot, I can at least test to see if the electronics are working on the keyboard just by jumpering keys on the PCB. I will then at least know if doing work on the keyboard is even worth my time at the moment, or if I should set it aside for now if the electronics are dead.

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

I don't know much about how it ended up there. What I do know, is that the person who used to own all of this computer equipment I found, used to run a networking business of sorts out of his house. The barn is full of old dial-up modems and such as well as computer parts and expansions cards of all ages. He seems to have had some money as there is a lot of stuff I have found that were particularly expensive and not an every day user kind of stuff, such as the server I found. It would seem that the barn was used as storage over time. The stuff inside the house was more recent, and older stuff got moved into the barn for storage.

Here is a picture of the bottom of the system to show the serial number. I haven't found a source online to determine if this was first run or not. Does anyone have a link to a list for the serial numbers?

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

Alright, so tonight is the night to open up the Amiga. First I wanted to try out some of those disks. It looks like half of the Kickstart disks work, the others don't. The issue I am faced with now is that the disk auto detection doesn't seem to be working. I managed to get it to work a single time by fluke, but it happened to be a non functioning disk that it happened with, so I didn't get any further. I can now get to the insert Workbench disk, but unable to get passed that point. After opening the system and removing the disk drive, I figured the little switch on the right was the disk detection switch, however, it seems to check out fine with the multi-meter. Does anyone know where the disk detection switch is? I figure this is why there was a Kickstart + Workbench disk in the drive when found.

On to the tear down! Or at least as far as I have dissembled so far.




The shield here is looking pretty rusty, but, but not as bad as the RAM or the keyboard.




Power supply seems to be from Oct of 85.




The inside is reassuringly clean!




The three girls. Denis is R5 rather than R6. From my understanding, this indicates an early American model that does not support EHB.




Not sure if any of these had a variation from early to older models, but here is a close up anyway.


Is there anything else you guys would like to see, or further tear down. I still have it opened right now as I am trying to figure out the disk drive's auto detect. Any help or suggestions on that would be great.

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

Wow, some days some of us are just oblivious to things. Usually Me.




Huh..... Well that's odd placement for a button...




Opps, looks like they missed the mark with the screw holes. Well it WAS the first model, sometimes these things happen and quick fixes are needed.




Wait a minute... Mitsubishi? What are you doing here? From the future you say?


It would seem that this drive has been replaced before and I feel quite silly that it took me that long to realize it. I'm wondering if this is the cause of my auto disk detect problem. I was looking at the wrong switch earlier for disk detection, but soon found the correct one with the help of a YouTube video. All switches are working fine it seems. The fact that this is a drive that was swapped into it later, and that the auto disk detect isn't working is likely why I found a disk with Kickstart + Workbench 1.2 in the drive.

Is there a key that can be used on the keyboard to initiate the reading of the desk at the insert workbench disk screen?

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

No, I don't think not is a drive read head problem, because when it is trying to read something, it reads just fine, no struggling at all. The problem is that it doesn't detect that insert the disk. I was thinking though, and since the drive will read a disk just fine if the disk is in the drive while you boot, it clearly must since that there is a disk in the drive. The problem might in fact be that it doesn't detect that the previous disk was removed. This is of course speculation as I do not know exactly how the drive's disk detection works, other than the physical switch.

There are some guides out there to modify other disks drives to be comparable with an Amiga. I haven't found one for this particular drive yet though. I'll be returning to the barn tomorrow. There were a few drives in there that I might check model numbers to see if any of them are able to be modded to work with an Amiga since it looks like an official drive would be quite costly.

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

Today I found a drive laying around that happened to be compatible with Amiga computers with very little modification. I used the information here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtMvoql0W8Y and here https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.ca&sl=de&u=http://honi.hucki.net/samsung.html&usg=ALkJrhiCrCz6osuQrYinWhZXzN6SttrZfQ



Here we have a nice clean and functioning Samsung SFD-321D modded and ready to go with an Amiga computer.




I once again tried to boot with the kickstart and workbench disks and tada! It works! The system now boots up into it's OS.


Now I still need to see about getting the keyboard to work, and finding a mouse that is compatible.

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

Yeah, this is my first Amiga, and I have been after one for years myself. I'm so happy I found it and that its is turning out to be in a lot better working condition than I initially thought. Much better than that NES I caught while fishing last year....

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

954,376 free ram? That's not a standard ram expansion ya got on there.  Normal would be 256k on the motherboard + 256k in the front...

Yeah, I noticed that. I was unaware that you could get more than 512k by using the front expansion port, so this is a nice surprise. Any label on the ram expansion module has long since vanished, but it looks like the case on the module opens pretty easy. I'll take pictures of that and post them. Maybe someone could help me identify it if there are no tell tale markings on the PCB. I will however be posting the pictures to a new thread, along with what I have here so far, as this thread was about getting it to boot to workbench, and as of last night I achieved that.

Link to the new thread about the restoration of this machine will be posted here as soon as I get it posted. Thank you everyone for your help and encouragement.

[Alley_Cat_Jack]

The new thread on restoring the Amiga is now posted and you can follow along and help out if you like here: http://amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?p=811643#post811643