d8b Forum

end of last year a brought an old D8B , the guy who had it , left it in a garden shed for a long whille , ( 5 years )
With the current situation with in this world i decided to get this old girl up and happy ......
i have tried everything but i cant get this project running . I keep getting the asterix of death .... i have an emulator for the floppy and a 30 gig hdd , the rest of the old girl is original . and i do mean old girl since she is the 166 mhz board .
Anyone have any suggestions ? i cant seen to get an operating system running ......

Hi KevieGee,

Do you get any signs of life from the desk? Rude solo light on? Anything on the VFD? If power is getting to the desk from the base unit then you should evenually get the oft seen "error 43 - Host did not boot" on the VFD.
If it has been stored for that long it will probably need a new CMOS backup battery and the BIOS reset to the specified settings.

Regards

John

hey mate
yes ive changed the bios battery and followed the settings for the bios exactly , yes the desk has power to it .....as i load the first disc of the operating system onto the computer , the asterix sits and i never get to load the second disc. the disks were downloaded from the forum . strange process but i can load windows 98 boot disk and i know the computer talks to the hard drive , yesw the hard drive is raw . Yes the bios is recognizing everything as it should . ive pulled the system down and cleaned it , removed the cards and re installed them , pulled the cables out cleaned them and pluged them back in .im still getting error 43 and still cant load the os past the asterix on the first disk

Hi KevieGee,

When it boots from the USB floppy emulator is there any sign of life from the emulator (mine has a disk activity light that illuminates whenever the USB stick is accessed). If it is booting correctly from the the first floppy the instructions should appear on the VFD on the desk. It should ask you to insert the next disk and then press a button to continue...is that happening?
Might be worth checking the data cable between the base unit and the desk. If this is bad, then all you will get is the "error 43" code and the software install can't proceed because it won,t move on to the next disk

Regards

John

hey John ,
yea mate the emulator is running . ive just checked the lead from the box to the desk . im still having the same error , ive been going throu the manuals and service manuals looking for a fault in the voltage side just incase . still after waiting for the computer to boot the desk will error 43 ... i just cant seem to load an operating system . the desk seems to check fine with the service manuals .... next i think ill be testing the pin config on the main lead , just incase . All the info i can get from the previous owner was he brought it brand new , a few years later went to pro tools and retired it . heard about the probox , was going to purchase one and pulled the desk out and it never booted again . So the old girl was neglected and left in a shed until last year when i landed it and between gigs and family i found time to clean it up , learn as much as i can from the forum and the D8B whizes here , im pretty excited to get it running and decieded if it does boot and dance for me , ill get a probox and run it with cubase ......

Do you hear the floppy drive on power up or see a green light next to it during boot? The console, when the bios is right, is set to look for a floppy as the first boot device upon boot up. It is possible that the drive has died. I replaced one in my rig years ago.

hey Crash
wish it was that simple , the floppy was replaced with an emulator ,i have run win 98se boot disk and checked that the hhd was accessible . yep the old rig can do anything except install the mackie os . i am leaning to think that the desk may have a fault somewhere ....

You mention that you have a 30Gb HDD...I am presuming that this is a replacement, hence the need to load the OS using the Floppy Emulator. Is that correct?
If so, do you still have the original HDD with the OS installed on it? If you do, I would try booting from that to see if the hardware is functional. If we can get the desk to boot from the original HDD then we can eliminate a lot of variables, which hopefully will help us figure out what is going wrong with loading the OS.
You may need to go into the BIOS and temporarily force it to boot from the HDD...there is a possiblity that booting from the emulator itself is causing the problem (I had an old PC that had to be expicitly set to boot from the HDD...if it tried to boot from the floppy with no disk inserted it would not move on to then boot from the HDD). In fact, I'd probably completly disconnect the Floppy emulator whilst trying to boot from the HDD
Another option could be to download the full HDD image (I seem to recall that someone posted a link on this forum to an image that they had made for the D8B) and load that image on to your HDD.
Another possibility would be to go the Compact Flash card route, again, there are numerous discusssions on this forum about that process, but this database entry summarises the process well.
I have also got an old 166MHz base unit which I am booting from a solid state disk, I cannot recall whether I imaged the original drive or downloaded an image from the forum and used that....either way it works well.

Hope that helps and keep us posted!

Regards

John

KevieGee wrote:hey Crash
wish it was that simple , the floppy was replaced with an emulator ,i have run win 98se boot disk and checked that the hhd was accessible . yep the old rig can do anything except install the mackie os . i am leaning to think that the desk may have a fault somewhere ....

My bad, not sure how I missed the floppy emulator part.

hey guys
Jomdev, i took your advice , and loaded the os from the dowloads of the cf card to the hdd ..... now the fun begins .... i have a dsp error card not ready on the screen . the system when booted also either pulls the error 43 or clips with all lights pulsing so i think the caps need replacing?