Dead A600 problem

[Puni/Void]

Sorry to hear about your problems, Harrison. Hope you'll manage to get it working again.

Have you tried disconnecting the floppy disk drive, HD, and removing the memory expansion? If you try to boot it without all that stuff, it could happen that it would work.

It is perhaps a long shot, but it's worth a try.

[Buleste]

Have you tried cleaning the contacts on the MOBO and also the ROMS?

[Zetr0]

check your PM's H

[Harrison]

Yep, I stripped her right down the naked motherboard! Then tried booting it with just motherboard, rom and keyboard connected, but still the same result.

Will check my PMs now.

[Harrison]

What are the differences between the different revision of A600 motherboard?

I know the first one is branded as A300 on the motherboard and has one extra chip not present in later version (what does that extra chip do?). But what about later revisions?

My currently dead A600 is a 1.3, and looking online I can get a 1.5 replacement. What are the differences between those two? They look identical in pictures. And what changes were made for the version 2 motherboards?

[Harrison]

I think it is definitely a motherboard problem now. It looked like there were a couple of scratches on the motherboard traces underneath the kickstart socket. So to test this out I got a 6B pencil and draw along the traces where the scratches were. On powering up the A600 I got a white screen before it went black again and remained black for all attempted after this.

So does that indicate that I've located the problem? I think the kickstart isn't loading because the traces connecting it to the circuit board have been broken by these small scratches.

I'm heard of circuitwriter pens. Has anyone used one of these, and if so would it work and fix this problem?

[Harrison]

Finally having a bit of time this afternoon I unwrapped the replacement motherboard I got from ebay and swapped them over in the A600. The motherboard I paid for wasn't meant to have a kickstart rom, but it had the older 37.229 rom fitted anyway, so I thought I would leave that one in the socket to first test the motherboard worked.

I fired her up and she sprang to life showing the insert disk screen. So I loaded Workbench 2 up to test everything was OK. Once that was complete I thought I should test the 37.300 rom from the original A600 motherboard to see if that was still OK, and that worked fine too.

So finally I thought I would give Zetr0's 3.1 rom in the new motherboard to see if it would work, and although it is a bit slow at initial boot to get to the insert disk screen it works perfectly. I have so far tested booting into Workbench 3 and that worked fine.

So now I have a working A600 again! So it now has kickstart 3.1, 2 MB chip ram and 2MB fast ram. The final step now is to setup and install the 6GB HD and it will be complete.