My A3000 is ill.

[patrik]

Sounds like a good idea to give it a good clean and then just for the sake of it see if it works any better.

After that, one of your friends should be able to repair it quite easily if it is just damage to the top layer. It is a four-layer board (two layers in the middle, one on top and one bottom, so if it has eaten into the middle layers, it can become a real hassle.

It would probably be best to repair the tracks by connecting them again by soldering and thin wire.

Those pens tend to be rather bulky and the damage will most likely result in a very uneven surface, with possible penetration to the middle layers and if so, painting a new trace would result in a short-circuit, so I would advice against it. Anyhow, it depends on the amount of damage and the situation. Your friend should know, or else he should not be doing the repair .

Here you can find schematics for the A3000 if you need to do any trace-validation between pins on components when repairing.

Btw, pick the friend which is most skilled with the soldering iron.


/Patrik

[Jtrim1]

Awesome, thanks again Patrik,  those links are going to be extremely helpful.  I am fairly optimistic that I may be able to get this thing working again.  

I'll keep you guys updated.  

Jeremy

[Amiduffer]

Hey Jtrim1. As a basic rule of thumb, make sure that all socketed chips are firmly seated. That used to cause my old A500 and A2000 to do that constant rebooting and the flashing LED. When I got my 3000, a lot of the DIP memory chips were loose.

[Jtrim1]

Amiduffer wrote:
Hey Jtrim1. As a basic rule of thumb, make sure that all socketed chips are firmly seated. That used to cause my old A500 and A2000 to do that constant rebooting and the flashing LED. When I got my 3000, a lot of the DIP memory chips were loose.

that's a good suggestion, I'll check that out too when I get the thing home in a little while.  

Thanks!!

Jeremy

[jdiffend]

If it turns out you need a new MoBo I have a spare I'd be willing to ebay.  However, you'd need to find out whats wrong with the SCSI on it.  It's flaky.  

[Matt_H]

If you can, hook up an Amiga monitor to the 23pin video port. I've seen a few cases now where battery damage has caused output from the 15pin port to fail.

Other than that, you're on the right track. Cleaning up the battery acid should be your first priority. Isopropyl alcohol is a good cleaner for this job. Even if the tracks aren't damaged, per se, the presence of the acid on them can interfere with the signal. I once got a 4000 working again by simply removing battery acid.

[Brian]

My thinking when something needs to stay on for a while for something different/better to happen it's most likely component dammage (solders and other metals expand when getting warm to give a possible better connection or capasitors thats on their last leg and need execive loading time for them to charge).

If I was you I'd stripp down the machine to motherboard alone (rule out other components such as bussboard, hdd/optical drives/floppy etc messing with the machine), make sure all the jumpers are set correctly. If you have a complete teardown in front of you with just motherboard and it still fails on you there's 2 options. Either it's the PSU or it's the motherboard and as you've just removed alot of load of the PSU without any changes occured it's more likely that the acidstained motherboard is actually dammaged (if you like you can always get hold of a second hand PC PSU and convert it to give power to the motherboard if you want to be totaly sure that isn't the culprit).

Remove ALL the acid and corrosion (dry clean is best to start with as water just gets the acid everywhere, then get yourself something that neutralize the acid to wetclean the rest and after that clean all again with regular wather), then inspect the motherboard carefully and repair dammaged/lost lines (and possible components) on the motherboard, don't be shy with the soldering iron.

Good luck. :-D

[beller]

And if all else fails (or perhaps sooner) there is JJ at Amiga Center France.  JJ did an amazing job on my A4000 and daughter card.  I had no Par: and my sound was nearly gone...not to mention no battery backed clock since I pulled the battery.

JJ completely referbed the mob and daughter card, fixed all the port and sound issues, and installed a rechargeable battery.  All for a very fair price.  Worth the postage from California for sure!  It's like having a brand new A4000!

Bob

[ZXoney]

I would try holding both mouse buttons down when you power up, just to see if you get the boot menu or not, If nothing comes up then I'd say the battary has done some damage to the tracks. But this doen't mean its just the video tracks, you could have a bad memory chip in the (Chip Ram array).

As far as replacing the battary, I used a standard two pin cmos battary clip from a old IBM computer, this way you can just pop the old one out and install a new one without soldering!

Your Opalvision video card is pretty good, but its not RTG and you will need a 23pin RGB monitor like the 1080, 1084, 1084s,etc.., The CV64,CV643D, and Picasso IV are your best bet! I have a CV643D in mine and it works great!

As for CPU upgrading, alot of the card don't work with out first making and small mod called INT2, This has to do with cards that have SCSI controllers on them, they wont allow the internal scsi to start up, or something, I have a A3640 installed in my machine, Its a 68040@25MHZ and makes a big differance over the internal 68030/68882! A 68060 card would be much nicer still but the A3000D drive plate doesn't allow you to use many of the boards, even with my A3640 I couldn't install a good fan/heatsink combo, I finally used a heatpipe with fan off an old IBM thinkpad notbook! This works very well as the fan blows the hot air straight to the PSU fan and out the back, as a bonus it cools my Zip Ram aswell!

I have another A3640(no heatsink) rev. 3.1 that is in Like New condition for $85 bucks, that is if you can get the machine up and running..Hope this helps and good luck!

Email:zxoney@charter.net

[weirdami]

My A3000 is ill.

Is that a Beastie Boys song?

[tonyvdb]

It could also be that your A3000 has an a3640 board in it, if this is the case these cards have been known to die and the Amiga will not boot with it dead the power light will flash just as you described.