Sorry this is a bit of an essay - it's a long story :roll:
The other day I dismantled my A1200 in a vain attempt to get my FastATA working. It's all put back together again now (sans FastATA...) but I haven't really used it since. Today I was playing a WHDLoad game, and then quit back to Workbench. My workbench screen came back, but then the screen just went black. The floppy drive was still clicking. There was a small graphical glitch that moved around when I moved the mouse.
I rebooted, and the machine went through the motions of booting, but there was no signal on the VGA monitor. Rebooted with no startup-sequence, ran setpatch, then pciinfo, and it showed no cards present. I removed all cards but the Voodoo, and the same thing happened. Tried another slot, same problem. Reseated Mediator, accelerator and Voodoo, no change, except that pciinfo now showed the Voodoo card, but still no signal on the VGA monitor.
I was starting to think that P96 was screwed, so I reinstalled OS3.9 on a spare partition, and then reinstalled P96 and Mediator software. I then rebooted, and got two recoverable errors, followed by a software failure. The only time this has happened before was when I was powering the system by a very low current PSU. The machine now has a 300W PSU. So I removed and reconnected the ATX connector on the Mediator, and the machine booted perfectly first time. I tried a couple more cold boots, then loaded a PAL game and quit back to Workbench, and it all seems fine.
Could it be that all along the ATX connector was on just enough to let the motherboard power up, but not enough to let the video card work properly?
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moto
