[bluegreengold]

Hey'all,

Thanks for the help so far. I thought I would post an update.

It seems like my suspicions were right and that the PSU was failing and that the SCSI hard drive was damaged in some way.

I got the athena 300 AT power supply. Unfortunately (although not surprisingly) it was not a 'drop in' replacement due to the size of its casing. I had to do some surgery and some soldering to get it to fit in the old case. The circuit board which the PSU resides on is smaller than the amiga original, so I could only screw it down in one corner. Because of this the grounding posts wouldn't make contact so I soldered some wires in to connect the different grounds on the board. I then built up some insulating pads with double sided foam tape and insulating tape so that the PSU would rest on the base of the case without shorting anything out. I removed the PC style AT motherboard connector and soldered in the old amiga PSU cable.

I removed all the cards and booted with just the floppy -- and it was good. I reinstalled all the cards and booted from the workbench install floppy still good!

In order to reinstall the drivers for the scsi card I needed either a second drive or a previous workbench install on an IDE HD. Rather than play around with the floppy emulators (which I have for my ataris) I decided to get an IDE CF adaptor and 4 GB CF card. I got the cheapest 4GB kingston I could find and did the install last night.

I boot with the floppy, it goes to amiga dos. I loadwb, and now I am not sure where to go. I used the HDtools to investigate the drives. I can see the scsi drive and I was able to install,partition and format (to 2GB) the IDE CF. I rebooted. Now it hangs at the boot unless I use the double button click to select the floppy. The floppy is the last priority boot device from the menu, so I guess it could be hanging while for a long long while before it gets around to checking the floppy. Perhaps I am being a bit too impatient, and that it would eventually boot from the floppy (many minutes later?) if I tried booting without using the double click?

I can see that somehow both the scsi and the CF drive are assigned boot priority of 0. I'm guessing this may be causing some conflict that is confusing the startup. How can I set the boot priority? I remember seeing a button for this in either the hdtools or hdsetup. Do I need to repartition and quickformat the disks in order to set these to different values?

I think I'm on the road to success here. Does anybody out there have a link to a howto for a clean install of workbench? I'm googling and searching the forums but haven't found one that is really step by step for an amiga noob.

I tried to install wb, but it tells me I need to insert the EV volume. I've read that this is a ramdisk necessary for temporary files and preferences etc, and that perhaps I need to edit my startup-sequence script? Shame I have no editor program available.


Somewhat worring is that sometimes it won't go to the double click bootup menu but just hangs there. If I leave the amiga alone for a long while, say overnight, then it will do the double click boot straight away. Could I be having an overheating issue? Or is something lingering in ram that is messing up the boot and the memory just has to drain?

thanks