Help please - A500 Gotek not working but Floppy Drive does

[max81122]

Hello.  I am new to the Amiga; owned a C128 and now seeing what I missed.  I am hoping you guys and gals can help me with an issue I am experiencing.

I bought a A500 Rev. 5 and am trying it out.  I've been reading a lot and watching YT videos for help.  I want to install a Gotek but am having issues.  I don't know if it's the A500 or something else.  I bought a Gotek from an Ebayer all ready for installing in an Amiga (just supply the USB drive), and I also bought one from Amazon.  I installed FlashFloppy 3.37 on the Amazon drive.  Both drives have OLED displays and I can browse the files both the buttons.  However, the A500 remains at the WB hand logo with no Gotek LED activity.  Both Gotek's are set to S0.  I have tried copying the FF.CFG file to the pre-installed one.  I also tried copying the HXCSDFE.CFG and AUTOBOOT.HFE files, as well as trying none of these files. 

With the Chinon FB-354 connected, the A500 will boot some Floppy games I recently bought off Ebay.  Some other disks have issues and won't load.  I am not sure how stable the computer is.  But if I can load 4-5 different games disks then it should be somewhat OK.  Curiously a Cloanto WB1.3 floppy from Ebay boots part way but then gives me read/write errors.  When I swap drives, I made sure the floppy cable's pin 1 is the same for both the real floppy and the Gotek.

I did try the pre-configured Gotek in a A1200 and it seems to work.  Could anyone tell me what else I should look at?   This is driving me crazy not being able to figure it out.  Thanks!

[max81122]

A couple more comments to this puzzle:
- The Amazon Gotek works in my A1200 just like the pre-programmed one does.  Again, neither work in the A500.
- The Wb1.3 disk will boot in the A1200.  Again, not in the A500.

So any idea why these will work in the A1200 and not the A500?  The A500 will boot some games off of real floppies.  If the Gotek emulates a floppy, shouldn't it be OK too if some games work on the A500 with a real floppy?  What could be causing the boot difference?

Thanks.

[max81122]

Turns out that the issue was a bad Even CIA chip.  I received a replacement on Friday and the new chip works great, and the Gotek works well. 

I discovered it because I decided to clean the board by removing all the IC's and using contact cleaner and rinsing the whole board down with IPA.  When I installed the IC's back I got a grey screen only.  Turns out that I had swapped CIA chips.  Unswapping them allowed me to boot but the Gotek still didn't work.  So that pointed to the CIA chip. 

With that fix I proceeded to do all my upgrades which includes:
- ECS chip upgrade
- cutting jumpers to make underbelly RAM seen as chip RAM, for a total of 1MB.
- Installing 3.2.1 ROM.
- Installing TF536.

All of this works nicely.  Still have a switch-less DF0/DF1 board to install and then I can button it up and enjoy the new system. 

[mechy]

Welcome and a nice job solving your own problem. A little reading can go a long way.