Just won a Amiga A590

HI All,

I won a A590 from Evilbay recently, pending pickup.

It was advertised as this -

- With Power Mod todraw power directly from A500.
- A590 powers up and spins hdd
- Connector broken on the back of the jumper switch.
- Autoboot has not been tested
- Manual WB loaded from disk but Hard drive or RAM could not be seen.

Opps I got too excited and just bidded on it, got it for a very cheap price.

I don't mind a challenge, just wanted to get ppl's gut feeling if they think this unit could be beyond repair or not. Was the power mod common for the a590?
First thing that comes into my mind would be the potential for excess current draw that could burn out things on the A500 side.

The only thing that can be burned out is the PSU power brick.

If it happens, replace the guts with an micro-ATX PSU and be very glad to do so.:)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rkauer

The only thing that can be burned out is the PSU power brick.

If it happens, replace the guts with an micro-ATX PSU and be very glad to do so.:)

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I already have a AT PSU modded for my A500. So theres no concern with power tracks on the A500 mobo being adequate enough to take the additional load of a modern 3.5" SCSI drive via the expansion slot.

I was thinking more of the lines of providing a additional 4 DIN power connector directly from AT PSU to Unit, just to be safe.

@ darkage

You'll be fine, doing the power mod with an ATX PSU; I modded an A500 PSU with the DIN plug to power my A590.

Post some hardware pr0n (sorry :oops:, pictures :lol:) of the insides of the unit and I'm sure we can get you sorted out.

:thumbsup:

When it arrives you will have to check a number of things.

Mainly see if there areany bad tracks/traces on the board, if all there is any broken solder near any connectors, or any shorts due to too much solder (with regards to the psu mod).

Also check for loose socketed ships like the ROMS etc..

You said the connector of the jumper switch is broken. That should be checked too.

Maybe spraying some circuit board cleaner around the board and especialy on the edge connector wont do any harm either.

I am pretty sure you will get this thing running in no time.

Big Bugger!

When I picked up the a590 the seller mentioned they they couldnt get autoboot to work and memory was not recognised.

The first thing I did when I got home was to pull it apart and clean the board with isophytol alcohol. Took out the 2 x EEPROM's, cleaned up the legs and sockets. It has a 1GB Seagate SCSI drive inside with 2 Meg of mixmatch same speed ram. The Harddrive has some sort of crystalise residue on it, so I took off the controller board gave it a bath and went over it with isophytol so now it looks new. The hard drive think the bearings are starting to go since it seems to struggle on spin up sometimes with a little short burst of a high pitched sound that is a little uncomfortable to my ears. The power mod soldering looks sound, and it looks like someone on purpose broke off the eg for the DIL switch (1 Position for Autoboot) to hard wire in a 2 pole switch to bring to the front of the case. I resoldered in the switch since this was missing.

I have v1.2, 1.3 and 2.05 kickstart roms. Im sticking to 1.3 kickstart for testing and I found a copy of WB 1.3 which I believe should be good enough version to operate with this hard drive. I cant find any indication of additional memory add or the hard disk in WB.

Any suggestions for troubleshooting? I did have the memory selector set to amnesia which allowed the floppy drive to sit there and seek on the Kick start standby boot screen. I changed the jumper to 2MB and I get flashing KB error. So I will test removing all the ram and just populate with same type for 512k.

Any suggestions for troubleshooting? I never really had a hdd on my amiga before.. so a bit rusty.

@darkage: Maybe you should start with just the hard disk part and go on from there once you sort that out. Keep the memory out for now, and try getting the disk detected first. Has it been shipped with the necessary software for the installation? If not, you could start by grabbing it from here: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a590
If nothing happens with the hard disk, look for a spare SCSI drive from a friend etc. just borrow one for testing to make sure it's not the board that's faulty. Last thing you can do is try to hook a SCSI drive externally since this baby has an additional 25-pin socket outside. If you're after utilizing some XT drive too, i wouldn't go through all the hassle for one..

You can also get a SCSI-IDE bridge and hook a CF card in there. I have a seagate barracuda, but of course your an ocean away, I found my SCSI drive deals at a web design firm, I called them and they said they have a few untested 50-pins and a tested UW, the latter of which I later sold. only one 50-pin survived the first few weeks but I got it for free!

I have a official a590 boot disk and found 3 spare 50pin SCSI drives I've had lurking around the place.

When booting up with the a590 disk, it seems to get stuck on the Amigados screen with the green drive light constantly on above the numpad.

seems not to be doing much at all.

Thats where I am with this currently.

@darkage: Most probably either your A590 floppy disk is damaged, or something's wrong with your floppy drive. If you can use various other floppies, it's the disk. Before doing anything else, try booting from a Workbench disk, and afterwards attempt to read any possible contents from the former disk. Maybe there's contents there you could salvage!
If all else fails, try downloading the accompanied software from the link i mentioned earlier on my last post.