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From: ridder@elvira.enet.dec.com (Hans Ridder)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Puzzling Paula!
Message-ID: <736@shodha.dec.com>
Date: 20 Feb 90 22:19:26 GMT
Sender: news@shodha.dec.com
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Customer Support Center
Lines: 26

I recently had a problem with an A500.  After booting the Workbench,
you could click and open the RAM icon, but if you clicked on the
Workbench disk icon, the system would hang (the pointer would freeze
after the first click).  A few seconds later the power light would do
the blink routine, but the system would not re-boot.  A three fingered
salute would get the blinks and then hang again.  You'd never get the
actual "guru".  After cycling power, you could re-boot.  This was
totally 100% re-producable.  Even tried different workbench disks -
same problem.

To make a long story short, after swapping everything but the key
caps, I finally swapped Paula.  That fixed it.  This puzzles me.  I
know she does the ports, disk data, and the interrupts.  The only
thing that I could think of was that she was corrupting the disk data.
However, if there were the case, I would think that the checksums
would fail, and I wouldn't have been able to boot.  Not to mention,
all the way to a workbench screen!

How is it that Paula would allow the system to boot, but fail on the
first click of the disk icon?   Any ideas?  Commodore people?

-hans
========================================================================
  Hans-Gabriel Ridder			Digital Equipment Corporation
  ridder@elvira.enet.dec.com		Customer Support Center
  ...decwrl!elvira.enet!ridder		Colorado Springs, CO