A1200 White Screen Freeze/Crash

[amiga4ever]

Hi,

It's been a while (1 year+) since I've used my Amiga setup for any significant length of time. I'm just now getting back into it and I'm experiencing crashes. In the past, this setup has never given me any problems.

Basically, I'm attempting to copy my entire AmigaOS partition (35mb) to compact flash. I'm unable to complete the copy because the Amiga keeps crashing. It simply freezes midway through the copy and the screen goes white. Doesn't appear to crash when the Amiga is idle. I thought it might be an issue with the PCMCIA interface, so I tried copying the same files to RAM (I have 256 mb RAM) but I get the exact same crash.

It has also crashed a couple of times whilst trying to run demos.

I have a Blizzard 060 accelerator with SCSI interface and drive, Goliath PSU. Blitzkick, etc installed.

Any ideas on what might be the problem? where to begin trying to trace the problem?

[Franko]

Hmm... If copying stuff to RAM causes this problem it could be a number of things, from the psu, faulty cables, overheating etc...

I'd do what I always do in such a case, which is basically remove all add ons (accelerator boards, HDS's etc..) and start from a basic set up adding things back in one by one to see when the fault re-appears...

I't may sound like a long process but in the end you'll usually save a lot of time and head scratching in trying to solve this problem, at least this way you will be able to narrow things to to what may be causing this problem, (personally I'd say the PSU is on the way out) but without doing this type of elimination check it really could be anything...

[motrucker]

Live near salt water? Could be corrosion on any number of connections. Here in the Chesapeake Bat area we have this problem from time to time.
If you have a lot of external stuff connected to the A1200 take it all off, and see what happens - add things back one piece at a time.
Somewhere in that process you may be able to get SnoopDOS to tell you something...
double check your PSU too.

[Cammy]

I'm not too sure about the crashing problem, it could be old components going bad, capacitors failing are a major problem with A1200s, A600s and CD32s. Luckily they can be replaced pretty easily by someone with soldering skills.

To get your system copied, I have some suggestions for you to try if you'd like.

First, when you are copying these files, are you doing it from your full Workbench install, from a program like DOpus or something? If so, try booting without the Startup-Sequence and try copying everything either from the CLI or type LoadWB and copy it from a default Workbench. It's possible that some patch or other program you had running in the background may have been causing the crash.

Another suggestion is to pack your whole system into a LHA file rather than copying the whole lot of files and directories. This means you're only running one operation and creating one file instead of hundreds or thousands, so it may be a little safer and not trigger whatever caused it to crash before. It also has the advantage of having your whole system backed up to one file that is easier to transfer to some backup media like a CD or FAT-partitioned CF card which don't keep the metadata that Amiga filesystems add.

[amiga4ever]

guys. thanks for your replies. just to update.

the mentions of defective PSU jogged my memory a bit. I vaguely remember that I once had problems with the male connector of my Goliath because it isn't perfectly formed. I think I had similar problems many years ago and the solution was to really push the connector very hard into the Amiga's socket.

I also think years of this hard pushing might have loosened the Amiga's PSU socket solder joints. So I may need to resolder them but atm it seems to be in a position that is causing it not to crash. i'll oprobably have to fix it properly at some point but for now it is working.