Sidecar crashes Amiga

[leofoe]

I know I have a difficult question about the Amiga 1000 with A1060 Sidecar. I think this combination is not very widespread, but I hope someone has any indication where to begin troubleshooting.
When turning on the combination, the Amiga crashes with a guru after running the first command in the startup-sequence, which is BindDrivers.
It works fine without the Sidecar. Same thing happens with this Sidecar connected to a different A1000. :-?

[leofoe]

I left the Sidecar for a while but decided to take it apart one more time.
First I did was make a new WB-disk from the installer-disk. No more binddrivers problems now. But the A1060 is not recognized: "Couldn't find Janus library".
What I did so far: Clean all connectors, reseat all chips. I also found that 3 pins of the sideconnector were not OK. I resoldered them so they make contact again.
Unfortunately these actions did not have any effect.
I am stuck now because I have not the slightest idea where to begin troubleshooting.
Any hints appreciated.

[Zac67]

Well, you could start with plugging in a POST card (to the Sidecar), they're ~10 EUR on eBay (ISA/PCI).

In addition, you could try an ISA VGA card/monitor and look if the Sidecar is showing any sign of life - I'm not sure whether it's starting before drivers load on the Amiga side though.

[leofoe]

After all these years I picked up this problem again. Used a multimeter to check the 86pin CPU slot in the Sidecar. Bingo! Pins 80 and 82 pins didn't make contact. Managed to solder these and voilà, the Sidecar works again.
Next problem: the 30MB Western Digital Filecard doesn't work. At first the harddisk didn't spin. After fiddling with it it spins, but isn't recognized.

[olsen]

After all these years I picked up this problem again. Used a multimeter to check the 86pin CPU slot in the Sidecar. Bingo! Pins 80 and 82 pins didn't make contact. Managed to solder these and voilà, the Sidecar works again.

Lucky you

I received a Sidecar as a gift, more than ten years ago. When I first plugged it in, it too would cause the system to crash when Binddrivers was invoked. I couldn't immediately figure out what was wrong, and since there was no alternative hardware I could have tested it with (it doesn't really connect well to an A500), it subsequently sat on the shelf.

I had bought the A1000 used, and it sported a curious memory expansion which fit into the 68000 CPU socket. In order to use it, you had to run a special program which knew where the memory would show up in the address space and made it available for use. This was likely a major ugly hack, and opening up the A1000 for the first time, I discovered that the previous owner had actually sawed off part of the metal shielding around the main board so that he could stick that memory expansion into the machine.

When I eventually received a MicroBotics memory expansion for the A1000 as a gift, I removed the CPU socket memory expansion hack for good. And out of curiousity, I also tried the Sidecar again. Guess what, it worked perfectly. What kept crashing the system was the awful CPU socket memory expansion that didn't even support AutoConfig.

It has been a very long time since I powered up the Sidecar. Maybe I'm going to take it out of storage over the holidays