Too many problems. Booting, Switching on, Resetting..

[MarkHughes]

Hi.

I have never had to ask for help before like this but I really am sick of my X1000 simply not working.

First, It totally ignores the reset and power buttons and just switches on as soon as the power switch on the PSU is switched. It does this even with the buttons disconnected from the motherboard. I'm sure it's not good for it but does anyone know why ?

Second, It is hopelessly unreliable at booting, I have tried for hours and hours to use this machine and I have spent at least 90% of my time trying to get it to boot or reinstalling the OS (I have done this nearly a dozen times now) Anyone have any ideas as to why this machine is so bad in this regard ? I have replugged every wire, Swapped the HD cable and indeed the hard drive itself, moved the ram to another socket, Blown the dust out etc... I am trying to use OS4.1final.

Often it gets to the end of the red load bar and stops but normally it stops at the black screen after that.

I can sometimes get it to boot and once it does it's great but each time it is shut down it won't boot the next day.

Also, Where is the hard drive light supposed to be ? How can I tell it is safe to shut it off without that ?

Many thanks to anyone who can help because as things are this is a very expensive door stop.

Mark.

[LyleHaze]

I can't answer them all, but I can offer a few things..

About booting reliability: Mine is very reliable. But you should install FE on a clean partition, then add the RadeonHD driver separately. The Radeon driver on the FE install is limited in resolution and features.
Also beware of where kickstart is loading from. Having bootable partitions on more than one drive can get confusing. If that is your case, I suggest stripping down to a optical drive and one HD to see if that might be part of your issues.

About that case LED:
The case has one LED. It is normally attached to power, so the button glows red when powered up. But there are options..
You could attach the LED to the hard drive header, then it will flash with hard drive activity, and stay off otherwise.
You could attach the LED to the P31 header, and it will work just like the power LED, but it will also be available for switching/flashing by script. You can find the means to do so at http://os4depot.net/share/utility/hardw ... ed_p31.lha

Myself, I grabbed a rectangular blue LED at the local electronics store, added wires to it, and then used superglue to attach it to the back of the power switch.

I have the blue LED attached to hard drive activity, I have the red LED attached to P31.

So the button glows red when powered, flashes a (very bright) blue for drive activity, and the red LED flashes whenever a script wants attention. I use that as a debugging indicator too.

There are also AmiDock programs that show hard drive activity. I don't recall the names right now.

If you figure out what has been causing trouble, please post back here so we can all learn!

Thanks,
LyleHaze

[danbeaver]

Dare I suggest a motherboard problem that might be best handled at the Cardiff level?

[MarkHughes]

Thanks for the replies

I was already down to a single hard drive and the optical drive and was doing a fresh install after wiping the entire drive. I also then installed the radeon 2 drivers that I bought.

I will be on holiday next week but once I get back I will order some better quality sata cables as the ones supplied seem a bit loose and can't be helping.

I will check out the LED solution, I would rather have a hard drive light than a power light as it's fairly obvious when its powered on.

"Dare I suggest a motherboard problem that might be best handled at the Cardiff level?"

For the power thing I was thinking the same, I will send them details of the problem and see what they say.

It's less than a year old I will have to see what warranty there is with them but I imagine it is still covered.

Thanks.

[broadblues]

For your booting problems, you need to debug what is going on, just reinstalling the OS repeatedly won't help anything.

Do you have serial connexcted, asnd do you see anything on it, and crash or or warning message?

Can you get to the early startup menu by pressing both mouse buttons while booting?

If so then it's something in your startup perhaps.

Try adding set echo on to the start of S:Startup-sequence to see where it fails.

It boots okay from the Installer CD?

[MarkHughes]

Ok, Seems the booting problem may be my own fault. When I installed OS4.1 FE it said during the install to add a SWAP partition, So I did. However it seems I messed up the file system type on the other partitions while I was at it. After some work with CFE and some investigating I got it all sorted so now my boot partition matches what CFE thinks it should be (Coming from classic Amiga's I had no idea about any of this, now I do). Amigakit support guy said I don't need the SWAP partition so I got rid of it. It is booting now on my SSD and I am typing this message from iBrowse.
Now I just have to see if it continues to work correctly when I fire it up tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

The other problem of it starting without pressing the power switch is (I am told) possibly due to the power being cut while the machine was on (Such as the plug being pulled out) Which is entirely possible because a few months ago we had a power cut while I was using the Amiga and it's been acting up about that long. No ideas on how to fix that yet though.

I did the blue LED modification as well as move the power led to those other pins you mentioned Lyle. Though my blue LED seems to be on all the time, I assume yours flickers according to hard drive load ? I prefer the blue anyway

So now I just wait to see if the power thing can be fixed and hope that it will boot reliably tomorrow. I will still get some better sata cables as the ones in the case aren't that good I feel.

It's been quite a learning experience so far this past week. I hope I can finally get to some coding after my holiday

[jdupuis]

Hello Mark! I disconnected the AmigaKit original HD on my x1000 and installed 2 ea. of my own new 1TB hard drives. I bought my own copy of AmigaOS 4.1 Final from AmigaKit and wanted to install my own copy. I, too was getting unexplained inconsistant booting glitches. The problem I faced and discovered: I did not properly "install" and Set up the Hard Drives in the Media Toolbox. Using the HD that came from AmigaKit as the example, I setup a small BDH0 partiton for the Amigaboot.of loader. Basically I recreated the partion set up that came with the original HD. My big mistake was not setting up my Hard Drives correctly in Media Toolbox. I haven't any issues after I corrected my mistakes. I'm an old Amiga guy, but I tend to back check myself, still. My little oops or overlooking something gets me in trouble. I currently am running 2 ea. 1 TB SATA HD's and 2 ea. 80 GB IDE HD's one config'd for Master the other Slave. When I got all correct in Media Toolbox - runs like clockwerk. Made sure I put a "lOADER" partion 116 mb on each drive "BDH0" "B__0" and so on. I'm not sure if this is necessary, but it didn't hurt. I don't have an HD light. I usually wait about a minute after closing all programs to power off. Just thought I'd share my story. Don't know if it will help. Cheers!!

[LyleHaze]

...
I did the blue LED modification as well as move the power led to those other pins you mentioned Lyle. Though my blue LED seems to be on all the time, I assume yours flickers according to hard drive load ? I prefer the blue anyway
...

My blue light flashes. Very quickly for the SSD, a bit slower for my magnetic drive. Of course this could be dependent on the drives used, I'm not sure what is actually driving the signal.

The nice thing about P31 is that if you do nothing at all in software, it's exactly what the power LED was. But if you want your CPU temp monitor to flash the power LED, or maybe as an inbox signal, whatever. it's easily available.

Glad you're making progress, and thanks for keeping us informed!

[MarkHughes]

Lyle, I am using an SSD, The blue light just stays on all the time though even after booting and the machine is just sitting idle and it comes on immediately on switch on where I would expect at least a small delay (It did this with the mechanical drive too). I will have to look into this then if you say it should at least flicker.

jdupuis The idea of a small boot partition sounds good, I will look into that as soon as I get this machine running in a satisfactory fashion.

It booted this morning, after first switching it on and off 3 times it booted on the 4th, I feel now that most of my problems are down to the power switch fault so I guess I can't do a lot more about it booting until that is working as intended. Though now that I think about it... It has never really been great at just booting from a cold start even when the power button worked.

Thanks for all the help and feedback so far guys It's been nice just to be able to game it out with people who know these systems.

[MarkHughes]

It seems the booting/rebooting/power switch problems require me to send the motherboard home to be checked out.

I want to say a big thanks to Christopher Follett at Amigakit who has stuck with this and made all manner of suggestions to try and get me moving again. And thanks to everyone here and on other parts of the board who's knowledge I have absorbed in order to get my machine up and running again.

Fingers crossed they can find something to fix and all will be right once again


I do have another question though, Where I live we have powercuts sometimes, I wouldn't say they are common but they are certainly not rare (they used to be every week but things have improved) I suspect this may have played a part in the downfall of my machine, What could be done to protect against this ? I know I could use an UPS (those are quite costly though IIRC) and maybe a surge protector would help, Any other ideas ?

Thanks again.

Mark.