Alfapower 500 Problems... Help Please!

This thing is becoming a curse! First i had all kinds of problems trying to set this thing up with my A500+ (wouldn't let me format or save changes to any CF cards without coming up with errors!) and now a couple of wires have come away from the buttons on the front of the unit (looks like a very poor solder job) :banghead:. One of the previous owners has made a complete mess of the wires and i suspect a few have been soldered back in the wrong place :dry:

If anyone owns one of these unts, could you please upload an inside photo of the power switch/LED blocks... There are quite a few pins and i'm not sure which colour wire goes where. I've already PM'd a couple of members who may still have one of these units... any help is greatly appreciated :)

Also... i'm still on the lookout for another A500 sidecar expansion as i don't intend on keeping this one: http://amibay.com/showthread.php?t=11456.

Cheers, Dan :cool:

Spock-79 is truly a great person :)

He kindly emailed me a few photo's of the wiring in his Alfapower and it makes me even more shocked about the condition of mine! I never realised there were meant to be mini circuit boards attached to the led's & buttons :blink:

Here's a photo from Spock-79 of how it should look (minus the pubes :D) :

http://www.amibay.com/attachment.php...9&d=1290895404


And here's a photo of mine after some nutter obviously made an extreme cock-up:

http://www.amibay.com/attachment.php...0&d=1290895404

Big difference indeed!
As said, I'm not the first user - and I don't think I was a second.
But since it worked fine I had no intention to change anything or to look is it original wiring or not.

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Originally Posted by stachu100

Big difference indeed!
As said, I'm not the first user - and I don't think I was a second.
But since it worked fine I had no intention to change anything or to look is it original wiring or not.

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Don't worry i know it's not your fault. I wonder how the other previous owner broke it? I had to re-solder a yellow and green wire as they just "fell off" :blink:

Anyway i've got the HDD led's and button working again and i've also managed to get the 2gb CF card to work in my 500+ (it's formatting as we speak). I did a full low-level format on the CF card using my PC which recovered a few bad sectors... and then created 2 x 1gb partitions on the A500+ (FFS Dos/1 partitions) :thumbsup:

A CF (and HD units, for this matter) don't need to be fully formatted. Just do a quick format and you are good to go.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rkauer

A CF (and HD units, for this matter) don't need to be fully formatted. Just do a quick format and you are good to go.

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Well the CF card finished formatting and when the A500+ rebooted it came up with this message "Not a DOS disk in device DH0". When i load Workbench from floppies it shows the CF card as something like "DH0???". I go to format it again using workbench and it came up with a bad sector/ checksum error straight away! And if i try formatting with HDInstTools it comes up with "Format failed: error 21"... again :(

I'm starting to think maybe it has something to do with the max transfer, mask values and possibly buffer size? have no idea what they should be set to for a 2gb CF card... and the Alfapower uses "Polled I/O" and not "DMA" transfers... does this affect it also?

This is what HDInstTools comes up with (amongst other things):

Mask: 0x7FFFFFFC
MaxTransfer: 0x0000FE00
Buffers: 2033
File System: FFS (version 36.104)
DOSType: DOS/1

Cylinders: 3903
Blocks per track: 63
Heads: 16
Block Size: 512

Does anyone know if these automatic settings look correct?

Nope, this is related with bad power supply!

Check the voltage level, if steady (not oscillating) 4.9 to 5.2V, swap the decoupler capacitors (just the electrolytic ones), then, if problem persists, you can blame the CF/adaptor.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rkauer

Nope, this is related with bad power supply!

Check the voltage level, if steady (not oscillating) 4.9 to 5.2V, swap the decoupler capacitors (just the electrolytic ones), then, if problem persists, you can blame the CF/adaptor.

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Tried it with another CF adapter from one of my old A1200's (i know this one works)... no joy :(

I have 2 x A500 PSU's (one is 4.3A and the other is 4.5A) and i also have a Goliath PSU which if i remember is a modified 200W PC psu and i've never had any problems with these PSU's. I even disabled the 8mb fast ram and took out the 1mb trapdoor chip ram... still no good!

I think i may have a PSU from an old A590 somewhere. The PSU connector on the Alfapower looks the same as the one on the A590... Anyone know if it will work?

You can check the traces from the power connector to the molex for the HD. Probably you'll need to move a pair of jumpers or a switch to use external power.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rkauer

You can check the traces from the power connector to the molex for the HD. Probably you'll need to move a pair of jumpers or a switch to use external power.

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Well i found the A590 PSU and it has a 4-pin connector but the Alfapower needs a 5-pin :dry:

It has a pair of jumpers for selecting external power, but apparently the PSU was optional when they were new... so i assume many of them were sold without a PSU (i've never seen one specifically for this model). Anyway i personally don't think i'm having a power issue.

I will get this thing working... if not, then it willl be used as a chunky 8mb RAM expansion until i find another GVP HD8+ or similar :D