help with a3000 rev 9 not working

[satiropan]

since it's the first time i have to do with an A3000 in my life, I have to look for some advices for the fact that this machine doesn't start.
it was off for i think at least 15 years, dusty, and the battery made a good job in corrosion.
anyway I have cleaned it and checked all the lines near the corroded area and they appear  ok.
but I have not replaced yet the battery.
I have tried to turn it on in a minimum set up, nothing connected to it, just a commodore monitor and psu, I just wanted to see the kickstart screen (it has the v5 roms, as I have read it's rev 1.4).
the only thing I have got is a green screen for about 3 seconds.
the first thing i need to know, is the battery fundamental for turning it on, I mean, just to have the kickstart screen?
i know the battery is a must to boot from an hd, but i am not yet ready for it
the board has 2mb of chip ram on it, 16 dil chips, 8 soldered and 8 on sockets, and 16 zif chips for fast ram. I have checked fat agnus and all the socketed chips, moved them, cleaned contacts and reseated them, still the same result
any suggestion will be appreciated
thanx

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

You should get a Kickstart screen even without the battery.

Have you tried it with the HD15 "VGA" output, also?

Post some pictures of the damage?

There's a ton of threads on this subject already, have you tried some of them?  Here's one to get you started:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=13844

[mechy]

since it's the first time i have to do with an A3000 in my life, I have to look for some advices for the fact that this machine doesn't start.
it was off for i think at least 15 years, dusty, and the battery made a good job in corrosion.
anyway I have cleaned it and checked all the lines near the corroded area and they appear  ok.
but I have not replaced yet the battery.
I have tried to turn it on in a minimum set up, nothing connected to it, just a commodore monitor and psu, I just wanted to see the kickstart screen (it has the v5 roms, as I have read it's rev 1.4).
the only thing I have got is a green screen for about 3 seconds.
the first thing i need to know, is the battery fundamental for turning it on, I mean, just to have the kickstart screen?
i know the battery is a must to boot from an hd, but i am not yet ready for it
the board has 2mb of chip ram on it, 16 dil chips, 8 soldered and 8 on sockets, and 16 zif chips for fast ram. I have checked fat agnus and all the socketed chips, moved them, cleaned contacts and reseated them, still the same result
any suggestion will be appreciated
thanx

The battery is not needed to boot, but it does hold scsi settings etc.
I dont recall the version, but some needed scsi at least terminated if you had no device to boot...I could be remembering this part wrong.

[magnetic]

1. Green screen is a specific error probably agnus related (chip ram)

"Green - An error in the Chip Ram was detected. "

2. Make sure you have the daughterboard in, a3k cannot boot without it (unlike the a4k)

3. It will run without batt but you want one in a3k as like mechy says it holds some scsi variables but iirc it boots without it

[satiropan]

thank you for the advices.
what is strange is that commodore didn't write any troubleshooting guide to it....

[Castellen]

what is strange is that commodore didn't write any troubleshooting guide to it....

Well they did publish a service manual of course.  It's practically impossible to produce a magical guide to pinpoint an exact component failure for anything that could possibly go wrong.

And there's other guides about, such as this which myself and others have written.

The board should boot to the insert disk screen with just the power supply connected.  The Zorro riser board is required for ROMs OS2.x (v37.xx) or greater else you'll get a yellow screen.  With the v36.xx ROMs you have, it doesn't need the Zorro riser to boot.


As others have said, the green screen at power on is the result of the hardware test the ROM performs at power on.  It performs a simple write + read-back test for the chip memory, and if problems are detected, then it shows the green screen.

The problem isn't necessarily related to the DRAMs (the 8 soldered in ones in the corner), any faults in the bridge logic will result in the same error.  And fairly likely to be a result of the battery corrosion if it's bad.

Unfortunately it can be a fairly complex thing to repair if you've not done this level of work before and don't have the right tools.  I do component level repairs on A3000 boards.  If interested, contact me for an estimate and send a photo showing the battery corrosion: http://amiga.serveftp.net

[magnetic]

if you are in north america ACILL does repairs in CA. Hes always on here