ScuzzBlog: Diaries April 2021
Entry 2nd April 2021: Post 1: Amiga 1500 with GVP Impact Series II.
Amiga 1500 with GVP Impact Series II.
Man was this a complicated little problem. Sensible way to explain
the issue is with a few headings:
01: Amiga 1500 with GVP Impact Series II: Card considered faulty.
02: Card has what I thought to be a broken hard drive.
03: Hard drive is from a boxed version of the card never used.
04: The boxed card was used on another A2000.
05: The drive is not recognised though the card is.
06: Card given to flipping out and giving black screen.
Some while back I was trying to salvage a hard drive and to do
this I used what I thought was an unused card from a box for the
GVP Impact Series II. I transferred the drive and that worked
well. However the original drive was lumped back onto what I
believed was a faulty card and left the A1500 dumb.
That was the state of play up until today. Haven't used the poor
A1500 for a good couple of years. First problem was the ratchet
noises coming from the floppy drives. Sounded like the worms
were dry and the drive was graunching up the worm rod. It was
so painful to listen to and the computer struggled to boot.
I then hooked up an external drive and booted into the machine
but there was no hard drive. I checked with SysInfo and found
the card and the RAM. Sadly I was getting a black screen and a
lock up. And so I kinda decided this wasn't going very well
and I paused.
I retrieved the GVP box and found the manual and the install
disk for FAAASTPREP. I checked over the jumper settings and all
seemed OK. I fired up the software and this caused the drives to
appear. Neither had anything on but one was called scuzz. I had
been here before.
I used the Workbench partition and installed a crude Workbench
but no luck booting. HDToolbox was useless cus it was not set to
SCSI. Very mysterious.
Next I opened her up and stripped the computer down to the mobo.
First thing I noticed was a quite dreadful scratch by the battery.
I deduced that the damage was not caused by the removal of the
battery as nothing corresponded to pinchers, clippers or even the
battery swinging around. Very odd. Also I am pretty sure this is
the first time the cradle has been removed. And the battery wasn't
removed by me as it has been clipped off. I don't do that. For
now I can forget this as I don't think there is any damage to any
tracks. I also found nothing wrong with the board.
I pressed down on chips firmly, cleaned off the board, cleaned
the memory SIMMs and reseated the memory. Fired her up and the
two volumes/partitions appeared as I booted off a floppy. This
computer has the 3.1 ROM and is full ECS.
I then had a minor epiphany as I sipped my tea. ' BOOT PRIORITY '.
Sure enough the drives had their priority set the wrong way
round. I very quickly moved the Workbench to the other partition
and renamed the other to Workbench and like magic she booted from
the hard drive. There was a lot of dancing, singing and general
merriment before I proceeded to copy stuff to the drives.
I was unable to install the Workbench as the install was using
an IDE HDToolBox and couldn't see the drive. After a night of
copying stuff to the drives I eventually did find a SCSI toolbox
and remarkably that picked up the drive and the partitions.
On another positive both the floppies stopped their racket and
began functioning as they should without the graunching noises.
Anyhoo .... She is working just fine. Very well indeed. Slower
than a slow thing with a very good reason for being slow, but then
this is an A1500 Personal Home Computer after all. This computer
is probably the first A1500 that I purchased in her original box.
She is clean as a whistle and deserves a little more attention
than I have ever afforded her. I shall add a few more goodies over
the coming weeks.
Happy days.
Amiga 1500 with GVP Impact Series II.
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