Expert: Gregory Donner - 12/12/2009

Question
Hi Greg, I own a amigo 500 with a mate at controller and hard drive plugged into the expiation port. This is a weird one and I fix computers.  Ok 6 months ago everthing was perfect. If the unit is by it self Without the hard drive plugged in al works well and it boots from the floppy just fine. When the hard drive is plugged in it is mostly inop. Screen might be light gray, NO led no lights,nothing. The coning is the hard drive is running 3.1 workbench. The kickstart rom in the 500 is the 1.3 and in the expiation Controller (at 501) it is 3.1 There is a switch on the controller to go back and forth when the unit is working. I have replaced the hard drive, power supply Agnus and the internal rom. The only part I have my eye on is possible the 3.1 ROM that in the at controller. Thanks for your input. If there is any fee please just let me know.  Thank You   Mark

Answer
Hi Mark,

This is a follow-up to your original question:

This is a difficult one to answer, as I'm not familiar at all with this device. I would think as long as the hard drive on the M-Tec AT 500 is installed correctly with Workbench 3.1 (as you say it is), and you're using the right 3.1 ROM--for the Amiga 500--it should work. However, do you have any documentation for the M-Tec AT 500 that says it's compatible with OS 3.1? There really seems to be very little information about this device on the web. I did find this page that has some photos, but no helpful info or details, unfortunately. :(

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=569

There's also some discussion about an M-Tec AT 500 unit here:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?p=533439


Hi Mark,

There's no fee for advice here on AllExperts.com. :) I'm not aware of any hard drive expansion controller for the A500 that uses an AmigaOS ROM; could you identify what the exact model number is of the expansion device that you're using? That would help in trying to resolve this problem.

The software installed on the hard drive does need to match the ROM of the Amiga 500--3.1 and 1.3 are horrendously incompatible. If you haven't already replaced the ROM in the A500 itself, I would start with that, being sure to follow instructions, as there are different 3.1 ROM kits for various models of the Amiga (i.e. A500 and A200 vs. A3000 vs. A4000, etc.)

I hope this helps!

Greg