A500 Startup Problems with A501 memory card

[psxphill]

My hopes is that the hanging white screen is a tell-tale symptom that someone recognizes.

In my experience, memory problems trigger a guru.
 
Do you know if kickstart has disabled the rom at $0 when it dies?
 
You might want to patch a copy of kickstart to output more of an indication where it's up to.

[psxphill]

Failing that, it might be worthwhile finding out exactly where in the A500 ROM the screen is set to white.

White screen makes me think it's 1.2/1.3, I don't remember the later versions changing to white screen.
 
It also might not be trying to make the screen white, the cpu could be crashing and store a stack frame in chip reg space or some bus corruption.
 
Tracing POST issues is hard on Amiga without an eprom programmer.