871579l@aucs.uucp (Todd Lowe) (03/17/90)
Just recently I had a particularly strange and scaring crash with myA500. I was working and all of a sudden the creen went blank the power light flashed the hard drive stopped and my modem went crazy with the send ad recieve signals. When I rebooted my hard drive failed to respond. I powered down and waited a while. Still no response when I tried to bring it back up (not even a kickstart screen). My case (yes the plastic A500 case) was also fairly hot to touch at this pointso I got worried. I am removed the case and the RF/heat shield and started touching chips to see where the heat was coming from. It tuned out to be my new super Agnus, and it was *HOT*. I removed it and put my old one back in to try and check the hard drive, with a fair amount of luck. I still had problems mounting all partitions, but was able to back up the drive before shutting down. I let the system rest for a day or two, and then placed my new Agnus back in powered up and lo it worked. Amazing! I've been working now for about a week with the case open and the chip has not got hot again. I would like to know what caused this. I had been running with PALboot ( giving me a PAL screen on an NTSC system) and a few people said it may have been messing the chip up. I thought the new Agnus was both PAL and NTSC in the same chip (ie. only one version supporting both), but haven't used PAL since just in case. Could someone with a little knowledge please let me know if this has happened to anyone else, and if it was due to PALboot or what. This is posted in comp.sys.amiga instead of hardware partly as a warning about PALboot if that was the cause and partly because the flow in comp.sys .amiga.hardware at this site is small enough I wonder how many people are actually getting it. Anyway if anyone has anything to add to this subject or can give me some help then please do. It is a scary thing when having a system CRASH & BURN almost becomes literal. Todd Lowe 871579l@aucs
johnf@stew.ssl.berkeley.edu (John Flanagan) (03/18/90)
In article <1990Mar17.051413.7321@aucs.uucp> 871579l@aucs.UUCP (Todd Lowe) writes: >Just recently I had a particularly strange and scaring crash with myA500. [overheating Agnus story deleted...] >I had been running with PALboot ( giving me a PAL >screen on an NTSC system) and a few people said it may have been messing the >chip up. I thought the new Agnus was both PAL and NTSC in the same chip >(ie. only one version supporting both), but haven't used PAL since just in case. > >Could someone with a little knowledge please let me know if this has happened >to anyone else, and if it was due to PALboot or what. > Well, I don't know what could have been wrong with your Agnus, but I use PALboot all the time, and have had no such problem. John John Flanagan Space Sciences Laboratory johnf@ssl.berkeley.edu University of California (...!ucbvax!soc1.ssl!johnf) Berkeley, CA 94720 Manners Maketh Man. (415) 643-6308