I set up my Amiga 600 the other day and my Commodore 1084S monitor, unfortunately I have lost the cable so have ordered one from eBay.

I decided to fire up the miggy to see if everything was still in ship shape since it has served me well for nearly 10 years. Unfortunately it didn't seem too good. When I switched her on the disk drive made a brief noise like it was reading a disk, but then there was no clicking, it wasn't searching for a disk.

I tried leaving it on for 10 minutes to see if it just needed warming up after being in storage for around 18 months but still no joy.
I put in a bootable disk but still no joy, it doesn't seem to be searching for a disk.
I can't really say much else until I get the monitor cable but I'm hoping it will be something simple like the floppy drive.

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Founder of NWAG - North West Amiga Group

Night Operations

A1200 020/28MHz + 64Mb / 4Gb CF / OS 3.1.4.1 / 1438S
A500+ / 2Mb
A600

@Earthling

Try a warm reset a couple of times... sometimes the hard disk can take a while to boot up and instead of booting it just jumps to the Kickstart because the hard drive hasn't had enough time to spin up.

Happens all the time on my A1200, especially as the hard drive is old, just keep doing that until the disk spins up and you can hear it clicking.

Alex.

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A1200, 68060/64MB/1.2GB/WiFi/AGAtoCRT/OS3.9 Pegasos I, G3 600Mhz/512/9200SE/80GB WinUAE, Ryzen 5 2400G/Vega11, 8GB DDR4, 256GB SSD,Win 10 Pro x64 Amiga Forever !

@DBAlex

It is a base model so no hard drive
Thanks anyway though!

_________________
Founder of NWAG - North West Amiga Group

Night Operations

A1200 020/28MHz + 64Mb / 4Gb CF / OS 3.1.4.1 / 1438S
A500+ / 2Mb
A600

@Earthling

If you have a boot screen (the purplish insert disk animation) then that is a good sign. If the screen is balck or some other color, that is not good. Hopefully it's just the floppy drive itself. Some times the micro switches that tell the OS if a disk is present or not malfunction. Check the cabling (power and floppy) from Floppy to motherboard. Try to fin an internal flopy drive ot try to boot from an external floppy drive using the early boot screen.

If the floppy sugesstions don't work then it might be the CIA chps or one of the custom chips such as Paula (it does sound and has some floppy circuitryt I believe). Since these chips are surface mount they would be extremely hard to replace or troubleshoot.

Hope this helps.

Drewlio77

@Earthling
You might also want to try to disconnect the floppy cable, as a bad floppy drive or cable can also cause this problem.

@Tomas

Particularly a reversed floppy cable.

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cheers
tony

Hyperion Support Forum: http://forum.hyperion-entertainment.biz/index.php

@Tomas

Quote:

You might also want to try to disconnect the floppy cable, as a bad floppy drive or cable can also cause this problem.

That happened to me last night. I replaced my floppy drive as it was playing up. I had a nice spare so hooked it up. The power was on the opposite side so looked a bit different. I booted it up but after it past the WB the pointer went into a clock and the floppy light stayed on. I could boot into a shell where DF0: said Unreadable disk IIRC. But didn't stick up my shell. I played with the power, it really seemed only go one way. I didn't play with the floppy cable because I had aligned pin 2 with the red line and the same spot on the A1200 board so that should be correct. I ended up giving up because it didn't work and put back my old floppy drive.

That drive is funny, it reads Amiga disks but won't boot any NDOS disks like Mortal Combat. It also looks dodgy, the bottom seems to be missing, I an see the spindle and pulley.

Last edited by Hypex on 29-Jun-2008 at 05:37 AM.

@Earthling

Before you can use the 1084S, at least hook up the A600 to a TV with an AV cable to see if there is anything going on screen.

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @Tomas Quote: You might also want to try to disconnect the floppy cable, as a bad floppy drive or cable can also cause this problem. That happened to me last night. I replaced my floppy drive as it was playing up. I had a nice spare so hooked it up. The power was on the opposite side so looked a bit different. I booted it up but after it past the WB the pointer went into a clock and the floppy light stayed on. I could boot into a shell where DF0: said Unreadable disk IIRC. But didn't stick up my shell. I played with the power, it really seemed only go one way. I didn't play with the floppy cable because I had aligned pin 2 with the red line and the same spot on the A1200 board so that should be correct. I ended up giving up because it didn't work and put back my old floppy drive. That drive is funny, it reads Amiga disks but won't boot any NDOS disks like Mortal Combat. It also looks dodgy, the bottom seems to be missing, I an see the spindle and pulley.

Sounds to me like it is not a Amiga compatible drive or that one of the pin settings is wrong. I had the exact same symptom when i tried to use a old floppy drive from a old Digital computer.

@Earthling

Does the CAPS LOCK light stay on?

If so, leave the machine for a while and see if it boots up (and by "a while" I mean a few hours) to the Kickstart prompt.

If it does then at least one of your capacitors has gone the way of the Dodo and needs replacing. It's a simple job (done it on two of my A600s - both had that problem). First one to check is the capacitor under the floppy drive - check for fuzziness around the base.

@Spirantho

Quote:

Spirantho wrote: @Earthling Does the CAPS LOCK light stay on?

YES it does!

I opened her up for the first time last night, that is the first time EVER since she was manufactured in 1992 everything looked fine.

No biggy now though, a friend is giving me an Amiga 1200 rig and I am sending the A600 to him to fix.

_________________
Founder of NWAG - North West Amiga Group

Night Operations

A1200 020/28MHz + 64Mb / 4Gb CF / OS 3.1.4.1 / 1438S
A500+ / 2Mb
A600

@Earthling

Good, sounds like that's your problem.

The system is actually waiting for the +5V (I think) power line to become stable. Eventually it'll do so and boot up, probably about an hour after turning on if it's like mine. If in doubt leave it overnight. :)

Tell your friend to look at the capacitors under the disk drive, and replace any that look remotely dodgy (or all of them anyway - there's not many) over the whole board. I just soldered some 10p-from-Maplins electrolytics onto my motherboards, they work just fine - you don't need to use surface mount caps if you don't want to.

You should have your 600 up and running again in no time, I reckon!

@Tomas

Quote:

Sounds to me like it is not a Amiga compatible drive or that one of the pin settings is wrong. I had the exact same symptom when i tried to use a old floppy drive from a old Digital computer.

Well it's hard to say. Prior to this the drive worked fine. At least for reading writing normal disks. But now I couldn't get it to boot even an OS install disk.

Perhaps I need to replace the floppy cable? Something is going, because the computer stated crashing when the keyboard metal touched the floppy. At one stage it was so sensitive that one key press would reset it. Very annoying!

So I covered it from making contact and it was fine for a while. It seems to have subsided now. Except the floppy is playing up! I can't test it now because my A1200 is connected to a VGA monitor and ATM a start up mess up prevents it from booting!

Last edited by Hypex on 19-Jul-2008 at 03:53 PM.

@All

Is the reason he wants his A600 to be fixed because it is cute? I mean he is getting an A1200, why would he want the A600 to be fixed if it not for the mere fact that it is cute?

@Foody

The main reason I want it sorted is because this was the very first Amiga I ever owned, back in 1999. I have sold it to a friend in 2000 but got it back 2 years ago.

A500s, 1200s and a CDTV has been and gone but I am reunited with the original 600 that got me started

_________________
Founder of NWAG - North West Amiga Group

Night Operations

A1200 020/28MHz + 64Mb / 4Gb CF / OS 3.1.4.1 / 1438S
A500+ / 2Mb
A600

@Earthling

You mean you actually have a valid reason beside the fact it is cute??! You mean you don't want it back because it is cute?



Awwww...

@Earthling

The A600's suffer from "issues" in the reset circuitry.
There is a missing resistor and an electrolytic that
goes leaky after a while that prevents it coming out
of reset.

All you have to do is replace the leaky electrolytic
with a 10uF tantalum and add the missing resistor,
it will then spring back to life. (hopefully)


The faulty electrolytic is a 10uF round (silver) SMD
6mm cylinder immediately above the NE555 chip under the
floppy drive mechanism. Replace it with a 10uF TANTALUM.
Watch the polarity, '+' is towards the NE555 chip.

The missing resistor is where the empty pads are,
two componets to the left of the capacitor.
Add a 330K 1/8th watt resistor (or there abouts)
across the empty pads. (anything between 100k->1M will do)

@Earthling

Hi,

Have you got a 1 meg RAM expansion board installed ?

If so, maybe the clock battery has leaked and damamged the board causing boot trubs.

Regards, Michael

aka rockape

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