A600 rev 1 and SD card issue....

[stevew]

Hi,

I'm looking for some help to diagnose my A600 IDE issue. I have a rev 1 "A300" board with KS 37.300, I have an SD-IDE adapter which I am struggling to get to work with this A600. The SD card I'm using to test is 64Mb Panasonic. The board has just come back from being recapped by Steve at RetroPassion. I have briefly had the IDE adapter working, but only intermittently.

Using winUAE with my A600 config, I used the WB 2.05 disks to install WB on the 64Mb SD card (I preped sd card with diskpart cleaned it, then added it to winuae using IDE(auto) as the option). I setup a 9mb primary bootable partition into which I installed WB 2.05 using the WB2.05 disks. I then removed other hard disks and tested the SD card would boot in Winuae, it did.

If I put this into the A600, the red led on SD adapter is lit, but the a600 does not recognise it. If I put the adapter with SD card and same ribbon into my a1200, it boots straight away into WB 2.05

I just reflowed the IDE header pins in case of a dry joint, no change.

Not sure what to check next? Any help appreciated

[Matt_H]

37.300 is known to be buggy with IDE devices. 37.350 is better, but a 3.1 or 3.1.4 ROM is better still.

Are you able to boot from floppy with the adapter installed? If so, you might be able to softkick a 3.1 ROM. If the system boots from the SD card after that, then you'll know whether you're facing a software issue (ROM version) or a hardware issue (A600 or SD adapter compatibility).

[stevew]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

37.300 is known to be buggy with IDE devices. 37.350 is better, but a 3.1 or 3.1.4 ROM is better still.

Are you able to boot from floppy with the adapter installed? If so, you might be able to softkick a 3.1 ROM. If the system boots from the SD card after that, then you'll know whether you're facing a software issue (ROM version) or a hardware issue (A600 or SD adapter compatibility).

Yes the purple KS screen is displayed and I can use floppy to boot. How would I do the softkick Matt?

[Matt_H]

SKick should work to softkick. I've never used it from the command line, but the docs should explain how it works. You'll need an A600 3.1 ROM image. Name the file kick40063.A600.

Does your 600 have any expansions? A stock 1MB system might have trouble since there's so little RAM to play with.

[Superman]

I had loads of trouble with my Rev 1 A600 trying to boot with ks 37.300. In the end I upgraded to ks3.1 and it completly fixed the problem.

[duga]

Upgrade to 3.1.4 (if your machine has at least 2 MB RAM).

[RetroPassionUK]

I would get a CF card and adaptor, I have never had an issue using those, but SD cards in a 600 i have...

[stevew]

Thanks for your suggestions.

I went into the loft to find some old laptop HDD's to test with the Amiga, I settled for a 60GB Seagate drive, I opened a new 10cm ribbon cable I bought from Amiga Kit, and to my surprise after booting using an adf of WB 2.05 install disk, HDtoolbox detected the SCSI device :-)

So I then tried the SD card adapter using the same ribbon cable, HDToolbox detected that as well. Okay I thought, lets just reboot and see if it boots, it booted straight into WB 2.05 using the SD adapter with my 64Mb card in.

So I then played with different ribbon cables, with different adapters and after trying difference combinations, it came down to a faulty ribbon cable.

So it just goes to show the ribbon cable could be the culprit, it boots everytime without fault when using the 10cm ribbon cable.

I spoke to Amiga kit today and they are going to send me a replacement cable.

[Matt_H]

Wow, good detective work. Glad it's working.