Greetings, any and all.

I have come to [strike]imperiously demand inform[/strike] *cough* politely ask for advice regarding the RocHard hard drive controller/RAM expansion for Amiga 500.

Recently, a young man gave in to retrotechnological curiosity and bought himself an A500 and even managed to find a RocHard controller with a preinstalled hard drive complete with a nice 2.x Workbench (softkicked, his physical chips are 1.3). Recentlier, said young man more or less accidentally managed to hotplug the controller into his Amiga and as expected (by us, but not by the poor fellow), it keeled over and now refuses to.. uh, unkeel.. over. Um...

Anyway, after a bit of slow troubleshooting with a fellow enthusiast it looks like something in the unit itself has been damaged. The controller prevents booting regardless of any switch settings and the Amiga remains stuck at a black screen. Without the unit, the A500 boots and works normally, so it at least seems to have escaped the incident unscathed. Condition of the drive (Seagate ST3243A 214MB IDE) is at the moment unknown, but the controller won't let the Amiga boot even when the drive is removed. To my knowledge RAM removal has not been tested yet - fiddling, testing and communications are slow due to the youngster having an actual life outside the realm of old computers. I can almost remember what that was like...

I haven't seen the unit itself, my knowledge is based entirely on RocHard motherboard pictures on the 'Net (Amiga Hardware Database has nice high resolution ones) and little bits of reading about the chips from online sources of variable reliability. (Also, my use of specific terminology should not be mistaken for actual understanding of electronic circuits, integrated or otherwise.) Assuming the damaged component(s) include any/some of the chips, what I'd like to know is:

- How buggered is this resurrection project in terms of chip replaceability? I gather the 7400 chips are trivial to find but what about the GAL ones?
- Are files needed to "burn" replacements for the GALs and the boot ROMs relatively easily available somewhere or would the need to read from working chips be unavoidable?
- Could the SCSI chip (if his unit even has one installed) be damaged in such a way that it would prevent booting even when it shouldn't be in use? I have no idea what sort of startup magic the unit performs within itself and at what point the switches are obeyed - i.e. whether "HD OFF" means "don't access the disk", "don't probe the bus(es)" or "don't initialise controller circuitry at all" and so on. I'm just asking because that thing is not needed for normal SCSIless operation and it can be popped off the socket.

I'm sure all help would be appreciated. Damn shame for this sort of thing to happen to a potential new Amiga [strike]cultist[/strike] hobbyist right at the start.