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[Sillisone]

Hi, I have an Amiga 500 that I'm trying to use a Dataflyer Express expansion with. It has 8mb of ram installed and is the version with the IDE controller.

Whenever the expansion is plugged in, the amiga starts with a gray screen that stays for a while before it asks for the kickstart disk and boots normally.

It doesn't matter if a hard drive is in or not. I am not sure how to tell if the ram is working correctly. If I have a hard drive in (the smallest I have is 6.4 GB, might be a problem) nothing changes.

The expansion came with a floppy labelled "auto install software" but it doesn't detect the drive either.

Do I need a smaller hard drive, or is there some other issue? Since it didn't include the manual, I have no idea about how to use this.

[VingtTrois]

If you don't have the optional external power supply, perhaps your A500 PSU is not able to support A500 with the Dataflyer Express+(big)HardDrive.
Check also if all chips/SIMM Ram are correctly inserted.

[TomJ]

All the jumpers must be set correctly for power(innternal and external) whether the board is in or not, ect.
Let me know exactly how it is set up.
I believe with the hard drive and the ram on my scsi i needed the external power for it to work. I no longer have the ram board I accidentally left it in a 3000 I traded. so I can't test it again I do have a manual and can tell you how to set the jumpers
after I get home from work.

[danbeaver]

I'm sorry, did you happen to check to see if the hardware is detected by ShowConfig? Does the ram show up in WorkBench?

Usually an unpowered expansion will prevent booting at all, so of the hard drive is attached does it have another power source? If yes, does the hard drive spin-up? Of course have you checked for good/clean contacts on the expansion port? Any LED flashing from the HDDs access?

If no hard drive showing up, have you unplugged it and just checked for the ram alone?

[Sillisone]

I have tried plugging in the external power, didn't change anything. But I forgot to mention that the hard drive spins for a bit on startup, as well. I don't know how to check if the ram is working, so I haven't done that. Though the ram looks properly installed. As for the pin config,near the external power supply in the back, there are six rows of pins lined up.

Each row has two pins and rows 2,5, and 6 have a jumper connecting the pins in the row. At JP5 the board says KS 1.2 = OFF and KS 1.3/2.0 = ON. There is a jumper there, and my amiga has KS 1.3, so that doesn't seem out of place. At JP2 there are 3 rows of pins, each row again has two pins. Each row is labelled. They are OPT, BASE, and SIMM. On BASE and SIMM, there is a jumper only on one pin each, the ones farthest from the ram.

[danbeaver]

ShowConfig is in one of the directories and will show hardware in a rather terse fashion. But WorkBench will list all added memory unless the hardware is so old you need an "addmem" command. I'm afraid I haven't touched an A500 in 22 years so you will have to find that manual online. It is bound to be out there.

All I can tell from what you have written is that power spins up the disk. Find the boot floppy for the device and look at the software it uses; this and the manual will help most.

[TomJ]

Will the Dataflyer boot without the Ram installed?

Is Workbench installed on the drive and which version?

What actual Rom do you have installed?

As far as the Hard drive I believe your partitions just need to be small enough and if I am wrong I hope some will correct me(there may be a size limit for the rom you are using).

Is there a readme file on the auto install disk?

If the ROM is a 1.3 you may have to put the auto install on your workbench boot disk. 2.0 and higher it will boot from the hard drive when set up properly.

Are you sure you have 8 meg 1mX8 and 2Megs 256X8? At JP1 for at jumper is 4-5 for 8M
2-3 and 6-7 for 2M

JP-2 should be installed

JP-3 connect the middle pins

JP-4 connect pins 2 and 4

J-3 has a warning about damaging your system if the power is connected wrong.

[danbeaver]

...

[Sillisone]

I followed TomJ's suggestion and took the ram out to see if it would boot - it did. I put the ram back in and turned the amiga back on. It still started up. I guess I overlooked something that should be tried first - reseating the ram. Thanks for the help, I probably wouldn't have figured it out on my own. Now I'm going to go play Lemmings.