Few days ago, by tracking local ad, I picked up something declared as faulty Amiga harddrive controller. Upon receival, it became obvious it's a AlphaPower 500 IDE controller from Alpha Data. Needless to say, that piece would pose as great match for my spare, KS3.1 based A500.
At first shot, it was as advertised - dead on arrival. After I pulled up the top cover, I noticed 2 loose wires which were actually responsible for a loss of power indication and onboard RAM functionality (both issues resolved quick by resoldering wires to a proper switch/LED positions).
OK, RAM is OK;both accesible and working great.
Continuing forward, since there was no harddrive installed, I thought it would be wise to install CF card via IDE-2-CF adapter. Lucky for me, I already had a spare kit with Workbench v3.1 setup for which I know it's working as supposed. Inspite of that fact, it won't boot Amiga; I can see device enumerated at early boot screen under expansion boards (both entries for RAM i SCSI are there) so I assumed there's something wrong with hardware. I managed to get a floppy with oktagon.device in Expansion drawer and Binddriver at startup-sequence; booting with that floppy allowed Workbench to "see" CF and actually perform operations (create/delete drawer, move some fiels from floppy, read text files etc). Just to be 100% sure, I ditched CF kit and connected real 1Gb IDE disk. No change at all; no autoboot, but everthying accessible with floppy booted binddrivers.
HDInstTools confirmed the both CF and HDD are defined as bootable; I think I could finally put some blame on faulty ROM. Any suggestion/second opinion ?
