Amiga 1200 help needed

[Chartus]

I am putting together an Amiga 1200 in a 500 case.  Everything went well and I installed a floppy drive and powered it up.  It booted from floppy with no problems.   So the CF card was next for a hard drive.  Used Winuae to prep a Sandisk 4 gig Compact flash card and got it booting in Winuae.  So then I plugged it in my CF adapter that was connected to the IDE 44 pin connector.  Powered up and NO boot ( dark grey screen)...found out that it wouldn't boot from a floppy with the CF hard drive connected.  I tried a few different configs.

1.  Boot from a floppy with no hard drive connected.----Boots
2.  Boot from floppy with CF adapter attached with No CF card and No power to the CF adapter. -----Boots.
3. same as #2 above with the CF adapter powered from the IDE port.-----No boot
4.  For kicks I tried plugging in the CF card and trying it. ----- No boot as expected

Now I tried an external power supply to power the CF adapter.  Plugged in the CF card in the adapter and tried to boot.  NO Boot.  So I got my old 2.5 hard drive and plugged it in and used external power to power it.  It would not spin up.  I unplugged the 2.5 hard drive from the computer and tried to power it up and it spun up when it was disconnected from the computer.  When it was spinning I connected it to the Amiga.  It continued spinning so I powered the amiga .  It booted  from the 2.5 hard drive.  Then I tried my CF adapter with CF card connected.  I powered it up with external power and connected the IDE cable' then turned on the computer and it booted with my CF card.

So the problem is that the computer won't boot unless the hard drive is powered up before connecting it to the  computer.  If you power it up with it connected to the computer it will not work.

Anyone have any ideas what might be wrong and how to fix it?

[Rob]

Sounds weird, never heard of a problem like this.  At first I though it might be the old spin-up delay but it should go to the kickstart screen if it was that and a reset would result in the drive booting.

[Merc]

Sounds a little like the power pins on the 44 pin connector are not supplying enough or any power to spin the drive?  Not sure why the card wouldn't have booted under external power though.  Have you tried a bigger PSU on the Amiga?

[Chartus]

I can reset the amiga all day long and it will not boot.  I think that one of the signals in the IDE header is either stuck low or high and it causes the computer to hang.

This is what I think happens.  With everything connected as normal I turn on the computer and the amiga detects the hard drive.  It thinks it is booting but nothing happens.  When I power it with external power and plug in the IDE cable; this bypasses the stuck bit that is causing it to hang and it works normaly.

I have 3.0 ROMS.  Nothing happens if I hold both mouse buttons down on boot.

It will not boot from a floppy with the hard drive connected.  It see's the HD and tries to boot from it instead and gets stuck

I have tried 2 different power supplies on it with the same results.  All the caps on the board look good (no leaks and all the solder points are shiny) but I will recap it if I have too. Running external power would bypass this as a possible problem in my opinion.

Does the 3 ROMS contain the early boot menu or is it just 3.1 ?

[paul1981]

All Kickstarts from version 2 have the early boot menu.

[scuzzb494]

Not at all sure I understand what the A500 case has to do with this ... Is anything left of the A500. Being very careful you can actually run the A1200 motherboard from the bench with no case. I have one running in a cardboard box. The diagnostic would be to strip everything away until you just had the motherboard and then work up. I say this because I had an issue like this once and it turned out to be a pin shorting out on the case as I closed the case. Open the case it worked, close the case it didn't.

Sorry if I missed something....

Here are some images of the cardboard Amiga and an A1200 in a 2000 case.

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/amiga_scuzz185.htm

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/amiga_scuzz222.htm

[Chartus]

Never had any problem with the case.  I just wanted to give complete information of the problem.  It seems that since I 'jump started' the  IDE port it has been working correctly.  I think it must have been a stuck bit or something like that.  The workaround booting seems to have reset it.  

The keyboard acts up sometime.  I wonder if the 500 keyboard hack is 100% compatible.

Thanks for posting