Dead A1200?

[Azy]

Hi

I just an AT A1200 from someone on ebay (sold as fully working) and just plugged it in, nothing!. all I'm getting is the power light, no drive click or can't access the early start-up menu, all that is on the screen is nothing!, just black, I've tried replacing the floppy drive (I got another 2 A1200's (both CBM) and also tried with a different drive cable, still nothing. Cosmetically, it looks great, no yellowing at all and clean as a whistle (inside and out). It's  really nice looking machine and I'm gutted that it don't work. Has anyone got any idea's?

Thanks

[Paul_Gadd]

Take out the rom chips and reseat them and see if you get a screen.

[Azy]

Tried that, still the same

[Azy]

Panic over, I'm a tit , just read this on the eyetech site "Also the 3.1 ROMs have some different characteristics to your previous 3.0. Firstly they can take substantially longer than your original 3.0 ROMs. If you have no HD fitted it may take upto 30s before you see any activity at all, it should then attempt to access your floppy drive and continue. The ROMs wait this long whilst trying to find a Hard Drive to boot from, if a Hard Drive is found then it will boot. If a HD is present and working it will boot and soon as it is found - it should not take as long before starting booting." waited 30 seconds and sure enough, it worked Woohoo, I'm happy now, I can put my hd in it and connect my cdrom and extra memory

[olegil]

Hehe, that is just SO funny.

I know the feeling. I have a P4 here with intel RapidBIOS on it, and some days it takes at least a minute from it's printed out the first 3 letters of LILO (the Linux bootloader) until something actually happens.

First time it happened I was trying to find a bootfloppy when it suddenly booted :-)

[Azy]

Well my other machines are 2.04 (A600) 3.0 (2 A1200's) and only ever had 500 and 1500 (both 1.3) before and have been away from the miggy scene for almost seven years, so really, I'm a bit of a newby again (in other words, expect some dumb questions to come in the next few weeks )

[Tesral]

Azy wrote:
Panic over, I'm a tit , just read this on the eyetech site "Also the 3.1 ROMs have some different characteristics to your previous 3.0. Firstly they can take substantially longer than your original 3.0 ROMs.

YES.  That scared the snot out of me when it happend the first time.  A4000 I was expecting the "disk please" screen almost as fast as I hit the power switch.  3.1 waits a little to give those big hard drive spin up time.

[Linchpin]

Yup that one got me too, 1st time i plugged it in i had the screen off so i didnt see the amount of time that it took, on second boot i was like "uho"....... hehehe :-)

[bloodline]

I remember haven just sold my A500 in late '92, and spent a week without any form of computer device... running to the computer shop picking up the A1200, rushing home... pluginging  in, switching on... nothing... panic...  :-o
I was used to the A500 booting up in 2 seconds, so I switched it off and then back on again... still nothing, so I repeated the procedure several times... then just left it on... as if by magic, after 30 seconds the disk insertion animation appeared...
I can't tell you how dissapointed I was that it wasn't such a speedy boot... but never mind, everything was ok after I got a hard drive.  :-D