exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

OK, so seemingly stable again and all drives accessible. The SCSI boot drive does have the correct boot options enabled, but stubbornly refuses to boot from the SCSI drive.

If I click on the main drive after booting it does load my desktop background, however I need the drive to boot from the get go as it loads things like the network drivers, not something I really want to install again!!

I'll keep an eye on it for stability for a bit and then go down the route of 'Why are you not booting?'.

So, I suspect we have a corrupted CMOS. I just did a reset (Hold down D on boot) and set the IDE drive to be bootable. It didn't have the !BOOT folder present and I started getting an error message saying that !BOOT wasn't found.

So I pulled the battery, rebooted and it's now booting from the IDE drive with all of my drivers present. Next I'll set the drive to be non bootable and hook up the SCSI drive to see if that plays nicely again.

For now though, I've pulled the battery and I'm leaving it for a while for CMOS to fully clear.

Fingers crossed again !

HigashiJun wrote: 27 Jan 2025 04:59 Fingers crossed again !

Well, it later stopped booting from my IDE drive, so I think the finger is pointing again at the CMOS, so I ordered replacements.

You can see as the boot starts it should try to load !BOOT, but it's currently only attempting to boot from floppy. The !BOOT file won't fit on a floppy, but most of it does and it tried to lad that, obviously unsuccessfully.

:dizzy:

@rubber_jonnie

Let's hope it's just the CMOS.

It started to be a never ending story with my A5000, and that's why I sold it for parts.

I really hate when you fix something and then it fails again for another reason that wasn't an issue before the previous repair.

Not to mention the time wasted on repairs, financial bottomless pits are definitely over for me.

HigashiJun wrote: 27 Jan 2025 10:15 @rubber_jonnie

Let's hope it's just the CMOS.

It started to be a never ending story with my A5000, and that's why I sold it for parts.

I really hate when you fix something and then it fails again for another reason that wasn't an issue before the previous repair.

Not to mention the time wasted on repairs, financial bottomless pits are definitely over for me.

Yeah, I hear ya. The trouble is with battery damage is that it can so easily come back to haunt you later. It's be good if there was a replacement PCB for it as I'd certainly go for one.

It's definitely painful for things to keep failing and as you say, it can get costly.

Mine may end up being sold for parts. God all that effort to set up the network adapter... And the cost :(

The hardest bit with retro stuff is knowing when it's time to call it a day.i have a Mega ST like that which works most days but no matter what I do, I can't get the floppy to work. So it's now back in the loft till I gain some more enthusiasm.

PhilC wrote: 27 Jan 2025 10:44 The hardest bit with retro stuff is knowing when it's time to call it a day.i have a Mega ST like that which works most days but no matter what I do, I can't get the floppy to work. So it's now back in the loft till I gain some more enthusiasm.

Yep, that's very true. Do I say 'enough' or does the time & money I've already spent justify further investment...

The CMOS IC's are pretty cheap, so that is worth a go, but after that may require further thought.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 27 Jan 2025 10:24 Mine may end up being sold for parts. God all that effort to set up the network adapter... And the cost :(

That's the reason I sold mine quickly: not to regret anything.

Battery damage was such a mess in my A3000 but it works reliably after being repaired. However, I bought the replica PCB since it looks really better than a repaired motherboard.

The A5000 was failing randomly, while the battery damage wasn't as bad as it was in my A3000. Each boot was a new surprise and I didn't feel like repairing it indefinitely...

HigashiJun wrote: 27 Jan 2025 11:09

rubber_jonnie wrote: 27 Jan 2025 10:24 Mine may end up being sold for parts. God all that effort to set up the network adapter... And the cost :(

That's the reason I sold mine quickly: not to regret anything.

Battery damage was such a mess in my A3000 but it works reliably after being repaired. However, I bought the replica PCB since it looks really better than a repaired motherboard.

The A5000 was failing randomly, while the battery damage wasn't as bad as it was in my A3000. Each boot was a new surprise and I didn't feel like repairing it indefinitely...

I know what you mean about each boot being a new surprise...

The main issue I have is that if I set booting, so *configure boot, all it'll try to boot from is the FDD and not the IDE or SCSI drives. Though yesterday it surprised me by booting properly from the IDE drive...

Ho hum.