Expert: Gregory Donner - 9/24/2010

Question
Hi. My amiga A600 is taking over 10 mins to boot up from switching on to showing the start up screen. I have kickstart version 37.300 and 2.0 roms. I also have a 1mb expansion board fitted in the trapdoor underneath. Have tried booting up without the expansion board but still takes as long. It only does this when the amiga has been switched off for a few hours otherwise I can switch the machine off and on and it boots up normally. Any advice would be most welcome.

Thanks. Alan

Answer
Hi Alan,

A very odd problem indeed! Doing some searching on Google popped up the following (the closest answers I can find for what you've described), but nothing conclusive I'm afraid. :( Granted, you have Kickstart 2.05 installed and not 3.1, but the only thing I can think of is that it's checking for an IDE hard drive or CD drive on initial boot up. Why it's taking 10 minutes though instead of 10 seconds is a very difficult one to explain. :(

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=41086

"The [10 second] delay is normal. KS 3.1 has a boot delay to check for IDE devices. If you've got no IDE HD connected then the delay takes about 30 secs. The delay is there because there are some harddisks that take a long time to spin up when you power on the system."

"You can get an A4000 IDE terminator from Amigakit, but I don't know if it works/is recommended for any other Amiga IDE.

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=831"

One post seemed to indicate that installing an IDE hard drive in your system might prevent this from happening--no guarantee, but worth a try?

I hope this helps!

Greg