My PPC 233 / 60 often refuses to boot up !! Why ??

[Effy]

I have been very lucky to get a 2nd hand Elbox tower with A1200 and a cute Blizzard PPC board with a fast 233 Mhz PPC and an almost as fast 68060 50 Mhz with 64 Mb Ram and a Bvision gfx card and a Zorro4 busboard. What can be cooler ??! I'l tell ya what : a computer that boots up every time you reset or turn it on. My problem is that the thing often refuses to boot up after a reset. So I have to wait a minute, or an half hour or longer. Is there anybody that is familiar with this annoying problem ?? I'm thinking about getting rid of it and concentrate on my 'slower' A4000 that is hiding in the closet ...

[Karlos]

Hows the ventilation in your tower? All that hardware generates heat (admittedly the 060 generally isnt a problem). The BVision cards generate some heat, especially if they've been overclocked.

Have you tried the usual litany? Take everything out and add the components back one at a time until you find the culprit...Pain in the ass, I know :-(

[Brian]

My BPPC also lock up sometimes when I reset my computer, thought a hardreset does the trick for me.

[Effy]

Karlos : I removed the shell of the tower so everything is wide open now. It's hard to blaim it on the heatproblem now. Besides, both processors give an equal heat if I hold my hand close to them. If heat would be the problem then I can install a so called twin-cooler that reduces temperature in my pc with 15 degrees. But I'm not sure if that's the problem, or is it ??

[SWAUG]

Yep the likely problems with a heavily expanded PPC system are :

1.HEAT
2.LACK OF POWER
3.BOTH

So to fix 1 you need put a large blower directly on the BVision Permedia chip in addition to an exhaust fan over the PPC heat sink.

To fix 2 you then have to make sure the A1200 motherboard has enough power.  Plugging a small floppy drive power connector into the floppy drive socket on the a1200 motherboard (be careful to plug it in correctly: done at own risk).  You must also ensure you have a good power supply (250W+).  Eyetech do a power feed adapter to enable power to be fed into the PPC directly.  Finally ensure you have a motherboard that has all the timing fixes.. avoid REV 2.B or 1.D.4.  The most reliable m/boards are 1.d.1.  We use a 1.B and that starts every time.

If you do all of this you should have a reliable PPC Amiga.

[Effy]

I don't know the revision of my board because there's a Zorro4 hanging over the place where that can be seen. The power supply is a standard one from Elbox, can't see any details without removing it from the tower and I prefer not to do that. About cooling the damn thing, I already use a so called 'twin cooler' in my pc and that 5,25" thing makes the temperature in my maxi pc case drop with 15 degrees (Celcius), wouldn't that be enough for my PPC hardware ??

[KennyR]

Wait you guys! This isn't a hardware problem. Don't screw with hardware because it's just a simple bug (feature?) in the PPC board. If it freezes and refuses to reboot, hit the off switch and back on again, or use a hard reset (like a reset button, if you have one wired up).

[Tomas]

sounds like a psu issue to me...

[Paul_Gadd]

@Effy

Easy way, open up your tower and point a normal desktop  fan in to the tower and see if the same stuff happens, if problems go away then  :-) if not they check PSU.

[Effy]

The tower is always open, a habit of my ex-A1200 tower. I shall get me a twin-cooler and install it in a 5,25" bay so I still have 2 bays left for cdrom and rewriter (that I don't have yet).
The reset thing won't work, been there, tried it, didn't work. If it doesn't boot up then resetting it won't have any effect at all, trust me.
The PPC card is one of the so called 2nd generation, so with less bugs and hardware problems than the first one. The dude who sold me the tower used to have a 1st generation PPC card 3 years ago, but that one is still in repair and he got a new one, the one I have now ...

[Effy]

Okay, I have not installed a 5,25" Twin Cooler fan in one of my 3 5,25" bays. Underneath it's empty and on the bottom bay there's a 48x CDrom. Now it seems to work. But ... I inserted also my older CV64/3D card and then I got another problem : the computer boots up but before it gets into Workbench it resets again and again and again. Have removed the screenmode.prefs file but no better result. Removed the CV64/3D and then it works again. Is there a problem between the Bvision and CV64/3D

[DeQuevedo]

Hi!

Well, you're inthe correct way colling your Miggy, but if it's not the definitive solution this http://www.aminet.net/util/misc/AbcsAmigaReset.lha

Will do the trick.

With that you can choose what kind of reset you wanna do (soft, hard, clear checksum, etc).

[DeQuevedo]

I forgot.

Yeah I think you can't have 2 RTG boards at the same time.

They access to the same recourses at the very same time....

[Effy]

I'm getting more clever all the time everytime I come here  :-D
About resetting. I have noticed that there's a differnce in resetting through the keyboard and smashing (read : touching) the reset button. In the last case it sometimes makes the thing hang. Strange ...
About not having more than 1 RTG board. Are you sure ?? Can I only use AGA and one RTG ?? Or does this only occur on Zorro2/4 boards and not on Zorro3  :-?