Amiga 500 Won't boot from hard drive

[ognix]

Well, try to describe the situation better: if you disconnect the Mtec hard drive controller, does the Amiga come up with the boot screen? (violet is OS2.x/3.x or white with disk in hand in 1.x)

By placing the controller by side, what's happening?
Not booting and getting the startup screen?

You changed the hard drive: with this you mean the hard disk itself, or the whole controller + hard disk?

Is your Amiga 500 a normal or Plus model (with battery directly on the motherboard).

...ahhh, sorry: I noticed you said your Amiga boots from floppy drive correctly.

Anyway, let us know!
Ciao,
  Luca "OgniX"   \8^)

[ognix]

Well, if you swapped two hard disks in the controller and you got the same behaviour, maybe the fault is in the Mtec controller.

I had a similar problem with my A500+ and an Oktagon 508 SCSI controller: after some months of unusing, I starup the system again, and I got a bad red screen, reporting serious problems.
Without controller everything was fine; disconnecting the hard disk gave me same results.
But by pushing the controller/moving it a bit, the behaviour changed (always no boot, but no red screen).
I investigated and I discovered that the problem was related to some oxidation on pins of some ICs inside the controller (that are socketed); all of this despite I kept my Amiga and controller in a good environment (no moisture, strong humidity, dust, etc).

Hope you can solve!
Ciao,
  Luca "OgniX"   \8^)