Dick: The first thing we do, we kill all the lawyers

  • Thread starter Thread starter bdb
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies Replies 11
  • Views Views 448
bdb

bdb

Well-known member
Assistant
AmiBayer
Joined
Oct 29, 2011
Posts
1,914
Country
United States of America
Region
Indiana 47909
This quote from Henry the Sixth reminds me of almost every hardware help topic response. It seems every problem is caused by bad capacitors and faulty power supplies. Without any questioning of the circumstances or the who, what, where, when or why (thank you Kipling) people blame the capacitors and power supply. It has newbies rushing their gonads to replace both testicles before they even check to see they have a phallus. For those of us who have been dealing with Amigas for almost 27 years, those are not the first 2 things we think of when a program crashes. Willie Sutton's law does not apply here; this is not were the money is. The hooves you hear in the distance are not Zebras unless your tuchus is in Africa or a wildlife park. That smell leading your hunting dogs astray might be that of a herring, a red one to boot. So lets think before we kill all the lawyers, a lot can be used to shingle a roof -- if you slice them real thin.
 
Excluding an obvious software-related problem or bad part installation (misplaced ROM or CPU in socketed boards), the usual suspects are old capacitors in SMD-based Amigas, because they really goes bad and do unexpected problems.

Bad voltages are also a doer on this matter, with the last port of call a cold joint solder or broken trace.

In the last possibility lies a problematic chip, but those are the normal nowadays steps to search for errors in Amigas.
 
bdb said:
And when a program crashes after replacing all that, do you repeat the process again?
Click to expand...

Oh yes, rinse and repeat :lol:

It's a common bug-hunting process to go through the usual suspects before doing more extensive fault-finding. I would say that replacing all caps first is a bit excessive at first and would be lower on my own list, but I understand it's very fast and easy for those proficient enough to do it.
 
In fairness, faulty capacitors really are a common fault though, in particular the SMD ones used on A600/A1200/A4000 boards. I'd be less suspicious of bad caps on the older through-hole Amigas.

But the other thing of course, is a thorough diagnosis of the symptoms. Random sporadic crashes could be caused by any number of things, but a dodgy audio circuit on an A4000 would certainly have me looking first at the capacitors.

Still, certainly a good point raised. There's a lot of "Oh, it's probably capacitors" before any real investigation has taken place.

:thumbsup:
 
another problem is when anyone is told of a problem with the amigas,its very short on infomation about the actual problem and with no pictures and resembles something like this:


hello im having a problem with my amiga and it crashes alot and heres the guru it failed on.
to be honest you cant get much info from that can you?


the idea is the person who is helping should have all the available information about the system in question and most of the time the info is very thin.



and no,its not always bad capacitors and power supplys.but you have to also realise the peaple you are trying to help are not always good with desolder station or even have basic knowledge of electronics.


and most of the time theres no list of hardware in the system as well,which makes it even more difficult to diagnose.

and you always hear peaple say we need more info on the case before we can help,well theres only so much can taken from text in a forum with a picture anyway.
you do realise theres only so much help anyone can give in text form,without actually seeing the machine in the flesh.
and even if you have a picture of the machine in any defintion with the info thats asked for will not help alot,you can only give basic pointers to fixing the problem because of the above.
 
You make a fair point but you should also see that the set of problems that come with a 27 year old machine are not the same as with a brand new machine.

Anything with 20+ year old electrolytics in it is living on borrowed time. Including stock amiga power supplies powering heavily expanded amigas.
 
I find it interesting (and somewhat scary) the number of people who buy a soldering iron and now are suddenly "electronics servicemen".
That's fine. But then they head out offering their service to others despite having no fault-diagnosis knowledge.

Getting back on-topic, my process involves looking at the simplest (and least expensive) options first.
For hardware this usually means looking at loose connections first, then a good inspection of all solder joints and so on until replacing components last.

For 20+ year old hardware though, the capacitors would fall somewhere in the middle of that process.

Anyway, I'm not a technician (I do have a degree in engineering though) and playing with my hardware is my hobby... I don't offer to repair anyone else's equipment.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2
 
Besides from the motherboard, bad hardrives and faulty memory on accelerators can cause a lot of :censored: too.

And software wise, there are many things that can lead to crashes like the Blizzard 2060 / Cyberstorm PPC libraries.

I did a two hour trail and error on Rischa's 4000D for my Cyberstorm MK I which I sold to him and bought back later this year.
It finally ran with the Blizzard 2060 libraries and not it's own ones.
 
And another pet peeve, since when does the wrong MaxTransfer cause all manner of sins with all HDDs, CF cards, SD cards and CD/DVD ROMs?

I've been programming, troubleshooting and "messing" with computers since 1974, and Amigas since 1986 and never had any issue with the MaxTransfer on anything. These days with OS 4.1, I set them all to maximum including CF cards on my A2000's GVP Impact SCSI bus. I read about a data transfer error and the universal solution is to decrease the MaxTransfer setting! Jesus, Joy of Man's Desiring, has anyone ever heard of proper bus termination? Checking jumper settings? Seeing if the file system is up to date? Using DiskSalv to access for errors?
 
bdb said:
and Amigas since 1986 and never had any issue with the MaxTransfer on anything. These days with OS 4.1, I set them all to maximum including CF cards on my A2000's GVP Impact SCSI bus. I read about a data transfer error and the universal solution is to decrease the MaxTransfer setting!
Click to expand...

For sure back in the 1986 you've had a lot of CF cards with size 4GB (and more) with speed x200 and you did not had any problems with them.
Not to mention OS4.1 on GVP Impact SCSI bus on A2000.
Hard drinking session?
 
No, back in the 80's I used SCSI drives, in the 90's I started using IDE drives. These days I use a combination of SCSI, IDE, SATA, CF cards, SD cards and one 128 GB SSD. I've only experienced problems with poor termination of the SCSI bus, poor ATAPI support, bad drives, server "locked" drives, and missing jumper information. MaxTransfer changes have never caused or solved me any problems.

Funny you should mention a GVP Impact Series original controller in my A2000 as I have Mech's card reader with 4 GB CF Cards set at MaxTransfer of 0X0FFFFFFF and no problems; well it is a X266 if that solves the world of issues surrounding it. I use other cards including an SD 2GB with MaxTransfer maxed.

Certainly there might be in the rarest of situations a hard disk problem that comes up that is uniformly not solved by dropping the MaxTransfer to 0X00000001. But of course what does a newbie like me know?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom