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Post by retrobits on Jan 25, 2009 16:29:54 GMT -5
My Amiga A600HD is failing. I think it's heat related. It powers up OK and runs in Workbench for a while, but then the screen blinks, after which I get a flashing red error message and "Software Failure" with some error codes. It says software failure but I don't think it's software. Once that error happens, doing a hard boot takes it right back to the error screen within a few seconds.
I opened up the Amiga and it looks like SMT parts under the hood - no place to re-seat or wiggle any chips, etc. Offhand I didn't see any blown caps or other signs of outright physical failure. I did re-seat the RAM card which is contained on a edge connector mounted board.
What a bummer - this is the only Amiga I have (it was a gift) and it's dropping out on me. Does anyone have any ideas on what - if anything - I could do to fix it?
- Earl
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Post by miner2049er on Jan 25, 2009 16:57:59 GMT -5
Are Amiga 600HDs the same as IDE laptop 2.5" drives?
If so you could easily swap it out.
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Post by retrobits on Jan 25, 2009 17:10:20 GMT -5
Are you thinking it's the hard drive that's failing?
I do have another 2.5" IDE drive available...
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Post by retrobits on Jan 25, 2009 17:17:14 GMT -5
First things first - this Amiga A600HD has a RAM upgrade card in it. I'm going to take out that card and run it for a while on the stock RAM.
If that fails, then I'll take out the hard drive and run it as an A600 (no HD) for a while and see what happens there.
- Earl
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Post by retrobits on Jan 25, 2009 17:26:25 GMT -5
I just read a very exciting post on an Amiga forum. It's a great idea...
CF cards and IDE drives are basically compatible with an adapter. I could put a 512 MB CF card in the Amiga, increasing its available storage by an order of magnitude, and giving it a solid state drive!
Of course, flash cards used as hard drives can suffer from flash "burnout" - where the same sectors get overwritten so many times that they fail. But - this would take a while.
- Earl
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Post by miner2049er on Jan 25, 2009 18:02:26 GMT -5
Are you thinking it's the hard drive that's failing? I do have another 2.5" IDE drive available... Difficult to say with you attributing it to heat, but either way it appears to run then almost randomly freeze after time which would suggest a bad RAM address rather than hard drive failure. Running it without those upgrades though is a great starting point. Oh, and I bought an adaptor recently from ebay for my ipod 1.8" HDD which I repaired by erasing the partitions and reinstalling. Be careful though, I heard tale of a CF card being burned out in less than an hour being used as a Hard Drive in Windows.
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Post by retrobits on Jan 25, 2009 19:03:24 GMT -5
Well, the CF suggestion came from an Amiga forum, but your point is well taken. Wouldn't want to unnecessarily kill a CF card, even if they are cheap. It's a given that Workbench doesn't have flash storage wear-leveling technology. OTOH, Workbench may not be as write-happy as something like XP.
I took out the RAM expansion card, and have now had the machine running for more than an hour with no errors. It might have been the added RAM that was unhappy. We'll see - I'm going to let it run for a few more hours as a test.
Once the RAM was out, I used the built-in Workbench test utility to exercise the hard drive. It came back with no errors, and this told me a couple of things. First, the hard drive appears to be readable on all sectors. Second, that activity exercised the system, including the processor and I/O, and no red screen of death. I -think- maybe my Amiga is back on its feet.
To compensate for my lost RAM, I also have a 2 MB PCMCIA RAM card for the A600HD. Believe it or not, you could get these RAM cards and they would function as System RAM. It's in there - so I'm back to my 3 MB RAM and a functional system (unless it bombs out later tonight).
- Earl
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Post by retrobits on Jan 26, 2009 1:03:53 GMT -5
Looks like the RAM might have been the issue. The machine has been running basically all day since I took it out.
Yippee, maybe my Amiga is still in good shape. :-)
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Post by miner2049er on Jan 26, 2009 3:49:54 GMT -5
Yippee, maybe my Amiga is still in good shape. :-) Good to hear. Now go get the game Supremacy (Overlord US).
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