G-force Combo030 boot trouble

Hi, I'm new to this, so please excuse me if I seem totally ignorant. I recently got an old Amiga 2000 with a Video Toaster and a G-force combo030 card with a bootable hard drive installed in it. It was kind of dusty and it took a few attempts to start up, but it finally booted up an started up the Toaster. Everything seemed to be working when I foolishly tried to reboot the system and now the thing will not start up while the card is installed. I can remove the card or remove the j2 jumper, disabling the card, and start up from a workbench disk, but nothing I have tried will allow the computer to boot with the card activated. Did I somehow fry the card by attempting to reboot? Is there a way to disable the autobooting function of the card or the hard drive. I'm pretty new to this, so I don't really know my way around too well. Thanks to anyone who might be able to help me out. -P

[a_petri]

Dear Peter,

having a G-Force Combo 030 myself, I have the following suggestions:

- If your card has GVP SIMM modules on it, try removing them, or at least removing and re-seating them. The SIMM RAM sockets on my G-Force Combo are of very low quality, and do not hold the SIMM modules firmly enough. (I have wedged a thin piece of plastic between the SIMM modules and the cable bundle of the PSU to push the SIMMs better to the sockets, but even this is not a perfect solution.)

- Try removing the plastic guide rail from the A2000 case that is supposed to hold the CPU card upright.
At least my instance of the G-Force Combo seems to be a few millimeters longer than the space provided for it, and while the guide rail was in place, I had to force the card to bend threateningly when I tried to insert or remove it.

- It may help to clean the contacts of the G-Force Combo itself (with a pencil eraser) and the CPU card socket on the A2000 motherboard (with an electronic contact cleaner spray, or even by blowing some air to remove the dust).

- Finally, I suggest to check all of the numerous jumpers on the card. You may not be aware of it, but the GVP G-Force Combo 030 has three varieties (25 MHz 60EC030, 40 MHz 68030, 50 MHz 68030), with *significant* differences in the jumper settings. I fiddled with the jumpers quite a lot while trying to overclock it, and I found that changing most of the "reserved" settings will cause the card to stop working ;-)

The "official" reference of jumper settings is at http://www.gvp-m.com/A2000combo030.html but a more readable version can be found in The Big Book of Amiga Hardware (http://www.amiga-hardware.com/).

Hi, and thanks for the reply. I have still been trying to get my card to work with little success, (but some), and I thought that I would update my post with more information as to what I have tried. Originally, I had the Toaster booted up and it froze on me for some reason so I tried rebooting by pressing control and the 2 Amiga keys. Then the system refused to boot again unless I disabled the G-force.When I try to boot the system I get a black screen. I did try a few of the suggestions that I got from this forum and from another one and I had a few glimpses of hope. I removed the ram chip and when I tried to boot I got a series of different colors on the screen starting with green, but then nothing else happened and when I tried to boot again I was back to the black screen so I replaced the ram chip. Then I tried reseating a couple of the DIP chips in the lower right corner of the card and pressing on a few of the other chips, and I reseated the scsi cable connecting the hard drive to the card. When I tried to boot up, it actually worked, and the Toaster started up, but it was frozen, so I shut the system down again and now it doesn't boot again. I think that on one attempt I got a few collors on the screen, but mostly it just goes black when it tries to boot. I've tried cleaning alot of the contacts with contact cleaner, but so far my success has been small. It was amazing to see that the information was still there in the hard drive though, and that the G-force had the potential of reviving. I thought that I had probably wiped it out. I am still trying. Thanks again for your help.