wierd A1200 memory issue??

[jrtolson]

i only came across this an hour ago and it has me completely stumped?

my amiga has a cf hard drive, apollo 1230 40mhz fpu and 16 mb ram (18 in total with chip ram)

it works perfect as it is.. however sometimes certain programs and games do not like my accelerator card, so in those circumstances i take it out, tonight i was trying to install reunion but the install quits out before it has finished, so i figured it may not like my accelerator board so i took it out...

here is the issue... without the board my amiga now thinks by default that it has only 1.5mb of chip ram, no more.. so my heart sank thinking "oh no not another amiga dead :-(" so i thought maybe 1 of the 4 ram chips have failed.. the weird thing is tho is when i put in my 1230 the ram comes back 2 mb chip and 16mb fast? so that rules that out..

i have not come across this weird problem before? nor have i checked the mobo, as i vowed to keep this 1200 mint as it is flawless "factory new, rf shielded, original glory", (my other a1200 does not like my apollo 1230, and my third 1200 no longer boots at all)

so if anyone could help me with this i would be much obliged :-)

[jrtolson]

hi dougal,

no i keep my os light, besides im using a vanilla os3.0 floppy to double check, and no before u suggest im not using fastrom either lol

yes sysinfo does say it has 2mb chip ram, but believe me im missing 512k somewhere?

and just to hammer this down lol, if i boot with no startup and say try and run UFO (1200) via shell, i get "not enough memory intuition error" as the amiga can only see 1.5 mb of the 2mb of chip ram..

really, i did not want to post an issue and look completely stupid if it was something simply dumb on my part lmao

im with u on the removing the board every time something does not work lol, believe it is once a blue moon, if that... :-)

[jrtolson]

hmmm, it seems if i disable the ide cf drive in early startup my ram returns? so it would seem that the cf drive is some how causing a hardware conflict somewhere?

which seems non existent with my 030 board in?

i think im coming to terms with he fact these CF drives are no wot they are cracked up to be... it has caused my amiga to hang on file transfer on more than one occasion, think its time to go back to a proper 2.5 or 3.5 hd... lol