A1200 boot problems!

[boomtopper]

Hi everyone i'm a new amiga user but have been lovin it.
I recently got my hands on an a1200 and have upgraded the roms to 3.1 and added Blizzard 1230 IV accelerator card. It was all working fine and then a couple of days latter it took ages to boot to get to the kickstart 3.1 screen. It also takes ages to get to the menu when you hold the 2 mouse buttons. When I insert the workbench disk I can hear the floppy kick into action for a few ticks and the LED flickers and the screen goes purple and then back to the 3.1 kickstart screen and the floppy LEDs are no longer flashing. I have tried with other floppys and it does not seem to want to boot them. I have also tried a minimal build by taking off the accelerator card but it still does the same thing, and i have checked the roms are seated correctly.
I personally think the floppy might have died but to make sure  I am checking with you guys on this forum!
Cheers, Richard

[melange]

Hi I'm just wondering if you are aware of the fact that you should never plug anything into your Amiga while it's on.  This includes Monitors, Joystick, Mice, Printer or Serial cables and external floppy disk drives.  In fact anything.  With amiga's you should always powerdown and add that cable/device, then powerup again.
With today's PC's you can plug most things into them with out it being a problem.  Example Monitors, Parallel printers, serial cables, etc... while the computer is rinning.  You just can't do that with Amiga's.  

Hopefully you have not been doing that and your problem is the floppy drive.  My personal experience with floppy drives is that most problems come from dirty drives and or disks.  Remove the drive and give it a good clean.  Isopropyl alchol (Video Cassette Head Cleaner) with a cotton tip will do the trick.  Very gently manually clean the drive heads.  If you have any high quality electrical lubricant (Contact Cleaner) put a tiny amount into the rear of the step motor(Do not get it on the heads).  The heads run on a rail, which can also benefit from a clean and lube.
If all goes well the drive will work again and be a little more quiet, when accessing the disk.

I this fails, then the drive may well have had it's day.  Talk to Amikit for a replacement, or mod a PC drive.  However, modding a PC drive can be a longwinded process.

Good luck

BTW the result of plugging things live into the Amiga is quite often a blown (8520) CIA chip.  This unfortunately is a surface mounted chip in the A1200, and would require someone with a high level of soldering skills and the appropriate equipment to remove and replace it.  As well, you would have to locate someone selling them, or massacre another Amiga  :boohoo:

[Brian]

ROM3.1 usualy takes about 30sec to get to the purple bootscreen if there's no boot device on the IDE controller. This can be fixed with "IDE_Killer.lha" from Aminet.

It might be the first signs of an overstressed original A1200 PSU if you're using one, that the floppy doesn't get enough power to work propperly.

[Tomas]

Hi I'm just wondering if you are aware of the fact that you should never plug anything into your Amiga while it's on. This includes Monitors, Joystick, Mice, Printer or Serial cables and external floppy disk drives.

I understand all but the joystick/mouse ports.. I dont understand what can go wrong there? Some games are actually made so that you MUST switch your mouse with a joystick if you happen to want to play in 2 player mode. I have done this since late 80s on mine and it still works.. What you say is true when it comes to the other cables though.

[melange]

I once blew a CIA in my A500, because I forgot to turn it off when I plugged in the Mouse.  The mouse 9 pin plug had  metal surrounding the 9 pin plug and it shorted the pins together on the mouse port as I awkwardly tried to insert it.  I, just like yourself, have been swapping joysticks and mice live for years, but not if it's got metal surrounding the plug.  So yes you are correct, but IF I recall, it was always recommended to get an auto Joy/Mouse swapper, rather than doing it manually.  The auto swappers make a clean safe swap.

However...

On a quick inspection of the A500 schematics, the Joystick/Mouse ports have little or nothing to do with the CIA's.  However, the floppy drive has plenty goin on in the CIA department.
The joystick port signals, all go to a 74 series chip and after that are associated with the Denise chip.  Perhaps I don't recall that particular saga as clearly as I thought.  I do remember seeing a spark on a port as I plugged a lead in.  May not have been a mouse at all
 :crazy:

[motrucker]

Tomas wrote:

Hi I'm just wondering if you are aware of the fact that you should never plug anything into your Amiga while it's on. This includes Monitors, Joystick, Mice, Printer or Serial cables and external floppy disk drives.

I understand all but the joystick/mouse ports.. I dont understand what can go wrong there? Some games are actually made so that you MUST switch your mouse with a joystick if you happen to want to play in 2 player mode. I have done this since late 80s on mine and it still works.. What you say is true when it comes to the other cables though.

This is a sure way to blow out the CIA chips in any Amiga model. If you haven't, you one of the luckiest people around!

[melange]

Cool, maybe I'm only half insane then!   :crazy:  :crazy:  :lol:

[Tomas]

This is a sure way to blow out the CIA chips in any Amiga model. If you haven't, you one of the luckiest people around!

That is indeed a really huge design flaw then. Like i said, alot of games force you to swap mouse with a joystick during the game, due to the fact that you need a mouse to start the game.
But this thing just cannot be common, as all my friends did the same and i see no easy way of shortcutting any of the pins using a standard amiga joystick or mouse, unless you are extreme unlucky. So i beg to differ.. It is you who were extreme unlucky if that happened.

I dont know of a single person who have blown their amiga this way. I know however of one who killed his a2000 by connecting a floppy drive while the amiga was powered on.

[melange]

As long as I can remember it has always been seen as a golden rule.  Even though some games did require you to change from mouse to joystick, it was always scorned upon.  All the help articles I read in magazines, were constantly reinforcing the power down before you plug-in rule.

[TiredOLife]

You can't just plug an unplug things with a powered on PC either.

[melange]

With the exception of PS2 Mice and Keyboards, actually, you can plug and unplug from a live PC.
If your PC is an AT or XT, then maybe not, but for the current crop of modern PC's, you can plug in printers to the Printer port, SVGA Monitors to the Video Card, sound cables to the sound card, any USB device of Course, serial cables, firewire, cables for video devices, etc...  It's all handled just fine.  I teach InfoTech at a TAFE college here in Australia.  We have a large screen and projector in my classroom, that they have never bothered to purchase a switch for, in order for me to switch from the PC's Monitor to the large screen/projector.  I must have swapped from large screen to PC monitor over a thousand times now, and done it while the PC is powered on everytime   :-D
No problems.

Further more I have watched classrooms full of students plugging peripheral devices one after the other, into powered up PC's.  The MANUALS don't even tell you to power off anymore, half the time.

I have fried an Amiga 500 plugging things into it live, but never a PC.

So sorry, but based on a ton of experience and what is quite clearly become considered acceptable practice, I beg to differ.

[Tomas]

I have seen alot of sparkles though when plugging in a monitor. But anyways, the chances are in imho very slim when it comes to both pc monitors and amiga joystics unless you are really unlucky. The only chance for a shortcut on the amiga i can see, is if the joystick/mouse connector has a metal piece and that you accidentally get the metal piece to touch the pins.

[melange]

@Tomas

Agreed!  I think what needs to be considered here is that,  if you really stuff it up while inserting a device into a port on your PC and you blow something, you go to shop and buy another for peanuts.  The same thing does not apply to the dwindling quantity of Amigas, Amiga hardware and replacement parts that remain.

Folks, if we are all not a little more careful we will have even less machines to play with in the future.  An awful lot of these machines will die from age.  We don't need to help them along.  Power down your Ami before you plug stuff in.

I often wonder how many younger newcomers, who have become interested in the Amiga, after learning to use a PC, have inadvertently killed the Amiga, by plugging things in while it's live.

[rkauer]

Guys, I agree with the discussion. I hotswap my joy and mice for eras now. But they are plastic, no metal parts to make a short circuit.

BTW: the PSU of an A1200 is only enough to handle the 1200 itself, never with an acelerator inside. And forget about a CD-ROM with it.

Look this, is a simple hack to do

[melange]

Hey, am I seeing that correctly?  Shouldn't the yellow (assuming that's shield, Amarelo=yellow?) wire be connected to the ground for shield.  Isn't it kinda dangerous to have +5v around the shield?  :-?