A1200 won't boot with HD attached

[Thomas]

What does the power LED do ?

What does the HDD LED do ?

What happens if you press Ctrl-A-A ?

How big is the drive ?

Is there anything printed on it about power consumption ?

Does it have jumpers ? How are the jumpers set ?

Are you sure the cable is connected correctly and properly ? Does the cable have any damages ? Or the connectors ?

Kickstart 3.0 or 3.1 ?

If 3.1 wait for 10 or 30 seconds. Does something change ?

[Thomas]

It's easy to accidentally misalign those tiny pins on the ribbon cable.

The drive wouldn't spin if the connector was misaligned.

Also, if you took that from an old laptop, I'm guessing a PC laptop, you've got a SATA drive when the Amiga wants a PATA? Am I wrong about this guys?

You cannot connect an SATA drive to a PATA cable, it does not fit.

[Thomas]

The drive might be too power-hungry for an Amiga. Or it might just have died.

Does the laptop still boot up if you connect the drive back to it ?

Do you have an USB adapter so you could try to connect it to a PC ?

Do you have a spare IDE cable ? Then you could try to cut the reset line of the cable. This sometimes helps to get the drive recognised after Ctrl-A-A. (You can certainly do this without a spare cable, but if you cut too deep...)

You didn't answer my question about the Kickstart version.

[Thomas]

Okay, do you know what the power consumption of the drive has to be before the Amiga will read from it?

No, unfortunately I am not familiar with an A1200's power dispersion.

I would assume if the Amiga boots and the drive spins, then power isn't an issue, right?

The drive might decide by itself that there is not enough power to initialize.

Or the motor does spin up but needs too long to reach its nominal speed, longer than the Kickstart waits for a reply. This is a well-known problem with Kickstart 3.0 and is usually called the "slow-spinup" problem.

Do you know which pin controls the reset signal?

The one which is marked red if it is connected to pin 1 as it should be.

it's 3.00.

3.1 could perhaps solve the problem because it waits far longer for the drive to respond.

[Thomas]

Doesn't using a soft-boot fix the problem of the Amiga not waiting long enough for a response from the drive?

Yes, but do you have any means to make a software reset ? Ctrl-A-A is a real hardware reset, just as if you pressed the reset button on a tower case.

Some drives are built to run through the same procedure after a reset as after power-on, although the motor is already spinning. That's the reason why cutting the reset line might help: if the drive does not notice the reset signal, while all other components in the Amiga do reset, the drive continues to run normally and is recognised when the Kickstart checks drives.

It I wanted to move to 3.1, I have to buy new chips and install them on the motherboard, right?

Yes, that's right.