Hello Amiga fellows. The time has come to ask about your great help and support for one more time.
If you are boring to read all this... Well the case is that the machine locks up on boot after a hard reboot attempt -power off and on-, it would get back to normal after ten or fifteen minutes.
So,
I have got back my Amiga 4000 today.
The motherboard is fixed, it got a damaged cia chip. Also some upgrades were made, PIO2 upgrade etc. So a new fixed mobo in town.
Everything was put together and back in action. My Cyberstorm PPC, with 128MB of RAM, my Picasso IV -Paloma TV card module included-, my Deneb USB card, a DVDRW and a hard disk, everything powered from a Liteon PSU. The on board RAM is 4MB chip and 16MB Fast Ram on five sticks, 4MB each. Those sticks were not the ones that my mobo used to have, but they were reported working on another 4000.
This configuration was working well in the past.
So, those are the symptoms that make me want to ask for advice.
The machine would boot fine. AmigaOS 3.9, AmigaOS 4.1 on all their victory. MorphoOS PowerUP was not booting, it used to with same configuration. Now this was a no go, actually the machine locked up when trying to boot in this partition, no drive clicks, however I am able to soft reset only to get on the same state. Anyway this is NOT the main problem but read above.
This is the important problem.
I discovered that the same symptoms would be presented when I switch off the machine and reboot. Let me explain. Amiga is off, I would power it on, it would boot and work fine. If I would turn tne machine off and power it on again after some minutes, it would lock up on the Deneb initial screen that appears on boot. Yes. I have tried without Deneb the machine simply locks up, anyway.
HDD light stays on.
No drive activity.
No booting.
There is caps lock on the keyboard and I am able to reset.
And sometimes a green screen on boot and then black screen, or as I said freezing on Deneb's intro screen. If I turn off the machine and turn on again for example on three or five minutes, it is still not booting.. But if I leave it off for a half an hour, or a quarter. It would boot normally.
So,
"Green screen means bad chip RAM", I thought. So I changed the RAM. Pulled out the five sticks of 16MB I was ussing and tried to boot with no RAM at all, thinking the the RAM on Cyberstorm will do the job. No booting. I tried with a single 8mb stick. Machine booted. I think I was using this 8MB stick initially on this Amiga.
Now the MorphOS is booting fine. So that kind explains that this should be a RAM problem. But the same prob remains. After second or third rebbot the nachine locks up on boot.
I have put the 8MB stick on the upper chip RAM socket.
The machine reboots perfectly on every soft reset from keyboard.
This PIO2 upgrade mainly improves hard disk speed, trying to test the hard disk behavior copying sn entire partition through AmigaOS 4.1, everything worked well, no crushes. Done that thinking that this upgrade could be the problem. It is actually a chip replacement on mobo.
Do you think is a memory issue?
Is there a way to bypass the on board RAM and use only the Cyberstorm RAM? Yes it is brand new.
Any further thoughts, ideas, advice?.
I will expect your replies.
