Amiga 1000 screen gets white after using kickdisk

[Christian Johansson]

I got an A1000 for free a couple of weeks ago and decided to test it today. When i start it it shows the kickstarthand-image. The builtin floppy drive seems to be broken as it only reads the kickdisk a few seconds and then shows the kickhand again. I tried with another floppydrive and then it reads more from the disk and then seems to reboot but after that the screen stays white. Anyone who knows what the problem might be? Any usual problems on A1000 ?

I tried two different dmsed kickstartdisks i had and also to create one myself with writekickdisk from aminet.

Thanks in advance.

[rkauer]

 Erm, hurm, harrrrannnnnnn..........

 Do you put the Workbench disk after the kickstart-disk?

[rkauer]

 BTW: you said the A1000 shows "the hand" right on power on?

 Does this little piece of MIL-spec hardware comes with a internal ROM hack?

 If I remember right, "the hand" logo only appears AFTER you insert the super-kickstart disk...

[narmi]

My A1000 shows "the hand" to ask for a kickstart disk first (kickstart is written on screen), then shows a hand asking for a workbench disk after the kickstart is loaded.

I had a white screen problem with my A1000, but it showed the white screen before asking for the kickstart disk.  The problem was a bad CIA chip.  You might want to open up your A1000 and push all the socketed chips into their sockets because they can come loose.  Also check that the daughterboard is properly seated (if your machine has one, not all do).

[CLS2086]

adfblitz and transwarp work well to make kickstart disc

[Christian Johansson]

i tried an original game after the kickstart-disk finished loading. But it won't read from the floppy after it finished reading the kickstartdisk :/

I also already tried pushing all the socketed chips.

My computer doesn't seem to have a daughterboard. It's just one big motherboard and small board in the front (under a plastic lid). I suppose it's a memory board?

Will a Commodore 1010 floppy fit good internally (if i remove the casing) in an A1000? (i think they look pretty similar)

(I can take a picture of the motherboard later)

[techie]

I had a problem like this with one of my A1000's. I tried swapping out the drive for two different A500 drives but the A500 drives suffered the same problem as you are describing (They would start to read the disc, the system would reboot, and ask for the kickstart disk again :/).

Eventually I managed to find another A1000 internal drive and  now seems to be working again. Not sure why the A500 drives wouldn't work though as they worked fine in my Amiga 500. If you can try to get your hands on another A1000 drive (not sure about the A1010 but it might be worth a shot) then hopefully you can get it working again.

Sorry I can't be more help.

[Christian Johansson]

Mine doesn't show the kickstart hand again though, the screen just stays white, even if make a reset. I've used a1200 drives when testing btw. But i might try to get an A1010 drive and try with that.

[narmi]

The drive inside an A1010 will probably be jumpered differently from an internal drive.  It will probably be jumpered as unit 1, while an internal drive should be jumpered as unit 0.  Look for jumpers on the drive labelled DS0/DS1.  DS0 = unit 0, DS1 = unit 1.

Have you tried swapping around the CIA chips? I'm not sure what that would accomplish, but I would try since it's an easy thing to do.

[amigaksi]

>i tried an original game after the kickstart-disk finished loading. But it won't read from the floppy after it finished reading the kickstartdisk :/

I had a problem with an Amiga 1000 that would read the kickstart disk but not the workbench or other most other disks.  I traced down the problem to be the SEEK mechanism on the floppy drive.  There are the STEP and DIR signals controlled by the CIA chips that perform the seek.  The Kickstart code is sequentially placed on the floppy disk so if the DIR signal is either locked in at 0V or +5V, it will seek only in one direction.  I wound up using the Amiga floppy simulator (http://amiga.krishnasoft.com) with the machine which proved that it was not the CIA (or Paula) chip since it would read the workbench from the simulated disk drive.  

[amigaksi]

>Mine doesn't show the kickstart hand again though, the screen >just stays white, even if make a reset. I've used a1200 >drives when testing btw. But i might try to get an A1010 >drive and try with that.

If you find that it's not the disk drive but the motherboard/chips that has a problem with the DIR signal, you can still make the machine useable using the floppy simulator here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320142495379

This includes a kickstart that uses 1K and allows you to take over the Amiga 1000 from the PC end after the kickstart loads without requiring workbench or any other disks to be loaded.  So even if the DIR signal works only in one direction, the floppy simulator will work as after the mini-kickstart loads, it will reprogram the CIA chips into asynchronous mode that does not use the STEP, DIR, nor SIDE signals.