Advice for trouble-shooting & booting a A4000T - Success!

[Ancalimon]

all the four ram slots are empty on my A4000T yet I had 2mbs of chipram. (when it was working 7 years ago )

[Ancalimon]

Hi,

I would pull the video toaster, then I would leave the A4000 on for at least a half hour, then try rebooting. If the A4000 has been sitting for a while without being turned on, somethimes it has a hard time starting (at least mine does) after I leave it turned on for a while turn it off then turn it on, it starts right up. What mine usually does it shows me a purple stripe going vertically down the screen then goes black. After I leave it on for half an hour (or more) then turn it off, then back on it seems to take the purple stripe and then waves it, then turn I hear the familiar click of the hard drive looking for files.

This could only be my A4000, I really don't know.

smerf

Wow.. your A4000T is hard to turn on sometimes. You have to warm her up first

[Ancalimon]

ffs system disks won't boot with anything below kickstart2.0

You'll just hear three drive clicks and nothing else.

[Ancalimon]

I think it's the battery. You need to remove the battery (if you haveb't done it yet, it's dangerous to leave it there) and install a new battery (preferably mod it so that you can use safe coin batteries)

After that you need to boot from an ide harddrive, run the report+ tool from aminet and save some bits to the NVRAM.

It may sound a bit complicated (well.. it does) ..  It's either that your scsi hdd is defective or it's the problem I described about the battery.  Also you probably need a new floppp drive.  First check its cables..  Also there should be some kind of add on adapter fitted on the disk module of A4000T. It could be missing or there could be a problem with that.

[Ancalimon]

On my Escom A4000T (Commodore produced only 200 A4000Ts)  there is an addon thats attached to the Disk Module and supported by silicon. I've been told that I would have to remove this addon if I wanted to remove the standard 880k floppy drive and attach a 1.76m floppy drive.

I recently bought one and will install that on my A4000T.

[Ancalimon]

You must boot from the "Install 3.1" disk and install AmigaOS3.1 that way.  Do no boot from Workbench3.1 disk and install AmigaOS3.1  

If you boot from your Workbench 3.1 disk, it will become the SYS: and it is something you don't want.


When creating partions, make sure the first partion (leftmost) is "bootable" and definitely smaller than 2gb. Make it fastfilesystem and don't forget to install fastfilesystem on the RDB as well.

Leave the logical names as DH0: DH1: DH2: (or HD0: HD1: HD2:) you can rename the "labels" as Workbench Work , etc...




If the above gives you the same result, there could be an incompatibility with the stock 68040.library and the setpatch command with your accelerator.





try renaming the 68040.library and 68060.library inside the libs directory to 68040.library.bak and 68060.library.bak (not the floppies)

turn on the machine and hold two mouse buttons.
boot with no startup-sequence

type the following:
---------------------------------------------
sys:
libs
dir 68#?
---------------------------------------------

you'll probably just see the 68040.library there I think.

rename it with the command:

---------------------------------------------
rename 68040.library 68040.library.bak
---------------------------------------------

Wait 5 seconds for all disk activity to finish and reboot. (if you reset too soon after the drive writes something, you risk invalidating your fastfilesystem formatted partion and that's a bad thing)

You will need the three libraries that are needed by your 060 board.

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/cyberstorm2






things that I "absolutely" needed to make my Amiga working properly: (with these disks, it felt like I could... CONQUER THE WORLD!)

1- AmigaOS3.1 floppies

2- A TCPIP stack (Miami and later MiamiDX on floppies (with the three keyfiles now on aminet) were what I had)

3- An external dialup modem with correct cable that I could use to go online and download stuff.

4- (optional:  TERM  ... a terminal program that allowed me to "ahem" download stuff it was so much fun. )

5- An old version of AWeb or IBrowse so that I could download stuff.

6- AsimCDFileSystem or CacheCDFilesystem on floppies to configure my CDROM

7- A floppy with DiskMaster3

8- a floppy with commands like lha, latest setpatch from aminet.

9- the correct 68060 and 68040 libraries for my card on a floppy.

10- IdeFix on a floppy (I'm still not sure if I actually needed this)
...

11- Many years later, AmigaOS3.9 CD




After installing AmigaOS3.1 and booting properly from the harddrive with no floppies inserted (if it crashes, try renaming the 68040 and 68060 libraries like I told you and try again)  you'll find a thing named PC0 in you Storage/Dosdrivers directory. If you doubleclick that and insert a pc formatted floppy (I think you have a high density floppy drive so your Amiga can read 1.44mb pc disks), your amiga is able to read its contents.  This is how you can transfer files from your PC to your Amiga.  The CrossDos version that came with AmigaOS3.1 is old and it only supports 8 character long filenames. You'll need CrossDos7

My Windows7 64 can not format floppies from its icon. I have to open a CMD and format using the dos command.

[Ancalimon]

Whew, I got some work to do it appears.  :roflmao:

Problem is, the A4000T will not boot from my Install Floppy, only the Workbench Floppy, so that is where my problem starts.

I know the floppy drive and floppy is fine, data is there and all, but my guess is there is something on the Workbench Floppy that the INstall floppy is lacking.

Not sure how I would get past that.

tj

The answer lies within your question. an Install floppy must be installed before it can be bootable.  (never remove the write protection from your original disks)

[Ancalimon]

amigadave:

He has the A4000T Workbench 3.1 disks and his A4000T 3.1 rom since it's not a Commodore one.

It seems like there's something wrong with his Install3.1 disk.  So he needs to install an empty floppy disk and copy over the files from the original Install3.1 disk to that empty disk and rename the empty disk as Install3.1

[Ancalimon]

I know it sounds stupid but although AmigaOS 3.9 comes with 3.1 inside it, you still need to have 3.1 disks in order to install AmigaOS3.9  because you need to have a working cdrom

[Ancalimon]

Make a copy of your bootable Workbench disk and then erase enough files on it to make room so you can copy all of the files from the Install floppy disk to it and rename it to the same name of your Install disk.  That should give you a bootable disk that has all of the Install files and allow you to do a proper install of OS3.1.

Hope this helps.

Yyes.  this should work too..  But you have to copy from icon menu I think.  If you simply copy the files to an empty disk, it won't work.

[Ancalimon]

To address your earlier message, A4000T's have lithium batteries stock. they do not have the leakage problem of the earlier rev A4000's. the 4000T's lithium battery is just soldered in.

Some 4000t's had a small board plugged to the floppy pin header,it was just for using a pc floppy in them(many came with sony drives). later ones came with ugly hacked floppy cables instead of that little board. Any 4000T can use a High density drive, you just need a good cable that hasnt been hacked. no changes need to be made to the disk board other than removing that small adapter if its present.

Mech

Maybe there is that dongle on this A4000T and it's causing problems with the Install disk and the high density floppy drive amigasociety is using?

Amigasociety:  http://winuaehelp.back2roots.org/background/amigados.htm
Here are explanations of AmigaDOS commands which shall come in handy.


Also don't forget that you definitely need this for AmigaOS3.1 to function properly with you card:  http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/SetPatch_43.6b

And this self extracting lha command to extract lha files: http://aminet.net/util/arc/lha.run