Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!uccba!ucqais!ggibeau
From: ggibeau@ucqais.uc.edu (George Gibeau)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Looks like it's that time of year; another weird problem.
Summary: potential chip problem
Keywords: HARDWARE, ERRORS, FAILURE, PROBLEM, I/O, DISK, HELP.
Message-ID: <1798@ucqais.uc.edu>
Date: 31 Aug 89 02:44:03 GMT
References: <12517@s.ms.uky.edu>
Organization: Univ of Cincinnati, College of Business Admin.
Lines: 32

In article <12517@s.ms.uky.edu>, phoenix@ms.uky.edu (R'ykandar Korra'ti) writes:
> 
>      If the second (external) drive is hooked up when I power the system
> up, its drive light stays lit. When I insert a Workbench disk into the
> internal drive, the system ignores it entirely. No reaction whatsoever.
>      If the second (external) drive is NOT hooked up when I power the system
> up, the system boots normally and initially works correctly. However, at some
> semi-random point in the near future, the system will lock up. This tends
> most to happen when someone tries to click on an icon to open a disk,
> utility, or application.
>                                                  - R'ykandar.

Have you checked the CIA chips?  I recently had a problem whereby the
drives would recognize every disk as invalid, or as having read/write errors,
the system would lock up after a few mouse clicks, window movements, or
keyboard presses.  The CIA chip(s) decode the keyboard, mouse, drive, and
a few other things.  A quick check would be to switch the 2 chips (ie. put   
the one in the left socket in the right socket, and vice versa), if the
problem either changes, or manifests itself in a different way, then
probably one of the chips is bad (they are very prone to being killed
by surges, spikes, etc.. such as plugging in components into the machine
while powered on).  Replacements chips are about $15-25 each (depending
on your supplier).  Hope this helps...

George


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