Getting an A1200 motherboard to boot.

[AmigaEd]

Hi,
I have got an A1200 motherboard wih 3.0 roms. I want to test this out. I don't have the keyboard, but I do have a floppy drive, mouse and 1084 monitor that I can use. I have tried to boot the machine using an external floppy with WB3.0 but it doesn't seem to work. Maybe it's not possbile to boot of the external, does anyone know about this?

I think I'm going to try booting with a floopy hooked up to the internal floppy connector. Is there perhaps something else that I need to consider if I'm going to verify that this board is any good?

I should mention also that I do get the disk requester screen so the KS roms appear to be working.

-AmigaEd

[pjhutch]

No, by default you can only boot from the internal floppy drive or the hard disk (if attached). It may be possible to select which drive to boot from from the Early Startup Menu (press both mouse buttons) via Boot Options.

[JuvUK]

hi
 i always thought a miggy with no hard drive and no floppy would boot to the insert disk screen ( all by its self)

[orange]

He should mention also that he do get the disk requester screen so the KS roms appear to be working. :-D

[doctorq]

@JuvUK

It will. It just takes longer compared to one with a floppy drive installed. The quick way would be to put a jumper on pin 1 and 2, as the Amiga then will think it has got a disk drive installed.

[Argus]

You can boot off df1: no problem.  I bought a used 1200 before and was having trouble getting the internal drive to line up with the case so disks would not insert properly. Anyway, I ended up just doing the boot and install from an old external C= drive.  The Amiga should do a boot check df0:, df1: then the internal ide port.  Your external floppy port may be bad if this doesn't work.  I also once installed a harddisk on an a600 w/o a keyboard using the same method so that shouldn't be a problem.

[AmigaEd]

O.K. so here is an update...

I took the floppy drive out of my A2000 and connected it to the A1200 Motherboard. I hooked up a 1084 monitor and a mouse to the A1200 Motherboard.

Next I created a Workbench 3.0 disk that i made by copying an adf image of  the disk to my A1000 using Amiga Explorer. i'm not sure this worked right as it throws a read/write error when it is finnished copying. I tried this several times with the same results. I thought that I would try this disk on the A1200 anyway.

I turned on the power and it came up to the insert disk requester screen. I inserted the WB3.0 disk and it recognized that i inserted the disk. It started to load and almost instantly showed a "Software Failure" Requester that said...
 "Program Failed (Error #80000006)"
 "Wait for disk activity to finish"

I also tried booting with  a WB1.3 disk and got the same results, but maybe that is not possible with KS3.0 Roms. The WB1.3 disk works well on my A2000 and A1000.

So, now what, I'm not sure what I should try next. UI would really like to determine if this Mother board is good or not. I'm just not quite sure what would be the next step. Is it possible that my WB3.0 ADF is no good  and that could be the problem? Is there a way that I can create a boot disk using WinUAE and AmigaExplorer? Any ideas welcome.

Thanks to Everyone,
-AmigaEd

[Argus]

Here's an idea: You could download the 3.0 Workbench disk in dms format (download a copy of dms too) on your peecee.  Copy the two files onto a 720K formatted pc floppy.  Put the floppy in your A2000 and read it via pc0: or CrossDos. Copy the files to your Amiga's harddisk (put dms in c:) and then open a shell and type dms -write "name of file". This will put the Workbench3.0 file back to 880K floppy (make sure you have a blank dd one in df0:.  Wala! a bootable 3.0 Workbench floppy for the A1200.

[TjLaZer]

I popped a bootable disk in DF1:  rebooted my A1200HD and it did NOT boot from the external drive.

:banana:

[AmigaEd]

@Argus,
I like the idea maybe I'll give this a try tomorrow. The only thing that might be a problem for me is the Wb3.0 DMS image. I don't know if I can trust that the ADF image I have is good, so I don't think I want to make a DMS from that.

-AmigaEd

[AmigaEd]

I just had another thought about this...

Could this be a file system problem? Is it possible Perhaps that I can not make a WB3.0 disk on an A2000 if the system is booted with KS1.3 or 2.0.

I also tried making an empty floppy on WinUAE booted with KS3.1 and WB3.0. I made the empty floppy adf in DF1:. Then I did an Install DF1:. When I boot WinUAE from this newly created disk it works fine. It boots right up to the CLI prompt. I copied the adf for this disk to a floppy in my A1000 by using AmigaExplorer and it seemed to copy with no errors shown this time.

When I tried the new bootable disk in the A1200 Floppy is just give the same "Software Failure" requester as before.

-AmigaEd

[tomekm]

do you have any turbo attached to a1200? if yes, remove it and retry.

also reseat kickstart rom chips. retry.

clean out the expansion slot. retry.

check your peripherials. retry.

check the power supply. retry. i remember once i lost the -12v line. the amiga booted fine, but liked to hang with "no reason", and the sound was noisy. i recovered the cable and all went back to normal.

check other things such as floppy ribbon, floppy itself...

i don`t think it`s a software problem, unless you have a virus, but this seems to be another story...

[AmigaEd]

Status Update!!!!

With some excellent help from Argus, I was finally able to get  my A1200 MB to boot.

Also just for sake of debunking a myth, with the 3.0 ROMS I was even able to get the system to boot WB3.0 with the external disk drive. I could even get it to boot with WB1.3 from the external drive.

Regards,
AmigaEd