Expert: Gregory Donner - 1/6/2010

Question
QUESTION: Hi, I recently bought a commodaore amiga from ebay for my Dad. We had one years ago but no one can remember how to start it up. I have connected everything and it seems to work but no matter what disk i put in i only get a grey screen up. Any guidance you could give me i would really appreciate.

ANSWER: Hi Gemma,

When you first turn on your Amiga, do you see a white screen with a hand holding a diskette? In other words, does the grey screen only appear after a disk is being read? Also, what model of Amiga do you have? (I assume it's probably an Amiga 500?)

Greg

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi Greg

Yes its a 500, when i switch the little power box on the screen goes grey, other than that it isn't changing even when i put a disk in? No hands or anything?

Some one has said i may have to load a commodore start up before putting a games disk in? I have absolutely no idea?

Answer
Hi Gemma,

If what you see is a light gray color, it sounds like your Amiga may well have a defective CIA (U8/U301) chip (which controls some of the basic functionality of your Amiga):

"LIGHT GRAY, CIA (U8/U301) problem, Stops at gray, CIA defective"

From the following website: http://www.nyx.net/~rdavis/AmigaHints2.html#BootColor

Depending on where you live, three possible places for repair (or another used Amiga) are AmigaKit (amigakit.com), eBay (ebay.com) or Software Hut (softhut.com).

Before attempting to have it repaired, you could also verify this error with someone on UseNet's comp.sys.amiga.misc and comp.sys.amiga.hardware newsgroups:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.misc

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.hardware

I hope this helps!

Greg