CPU Host Triage
Posted: Mon Nov 29, 2021 9:08 pmMondays... {sighs}
Flip the switch to boot the D8B up this AM, and much to my unpleasant surprise I get no video signal... {'Spidey Sense' began to tingle} and the typical Error 43 on the fluorescent display after timing out. Unconnect the AC cord on the rear of the unit and leave for 5 minutes as I would normally do in the odd event this type of thing would occur. Hrrmmm... no bueno... and rinse/repeat 2-3 times, same results. OK, it's fairly safe to say there's somewhat of a pretty serious issue taking place here.
Triage time... so I removed the host cpu from it's rack home, and carried over to the bench for a deeper look. All the screws get removed, and the case opened for the appropriate access. Nothing unusual detected visually or olfactorily, and it's damn clean, very little in the way of dust, etc... OK, that's no surprise and positive as an initial recon effort. I'm already at a disadvantage tho, short-term, due to the fact I don't have an internal pc speaker available at the moment (go figure, ordered one tho), so this is only gonna actually get so far until the speaker arrives... whatever. I'm kinda pissed at this juncture, so I continue on working out what I can do in the interim. Again, I didn't have a real good feeling about this when I embarked on it and everything that follows essentially confirms what I was thinking. To wit...
First things first, what happens when we have a minimal amount of tech involved to boot... so, I removed the LAN, MIDI cards... essentially everything but the cpu, video card, one DIM of RAM and the floppy emulator... I removed the CF interface for the boot disk from the equation as well. So, it's a bare-bones pc that I should at least under the proper conditions have the ability to access BIOS should the POC test start to execute upon boot. I also placed a volt meter one of the power cables on the motherboard to see what kind of basic voltages are factored in here... flip the switch... same set of circumstances. The meter is reading 5.0VDC dead on for the +5 rail, with 12.12VDC coming from the 12 volt supply... OK, power supply is moved down the list of suspects, for now. So, having pulled my HDR out of it's rack home at the same time I was removing the D8B, I switched the video cards to see if that would potentially be the issue... nope. All the RAM between the D8B n HDR (5 DIM's x Hyundai 128GB PC-100) was also cycled (remove/reinstall/reboot) and nothing changed the results. That points me directly at the Celeron CPU and/or the motherboard itself... and I'm leaning towards the motherboard. However, that's nothing more than an educated guesstimate without having the ability to confirm/condemn things with the hardware codes that will inevitably be barked back thru the speaker. Either way, it's obviously far from ideal but I'll eat the elephant pragmatically one byte at a time til I get things mitigated. Does anyone have anything to add here while I pump the brakes on this until that internal speaker arrives? Just curious really, I'm fully aware I can realistically only do so much with any certainty without that diagnostic tool...
Yes indeed, I know, this sux... but it is what it is at this stage of the game...
Thanx in advance, y'all...
Flip the switch to boot the D8B up this AM, and much to my unpleasant surprise I get no video signal... {'Spidey Sense' began to tingle} and the typical Error 43 on the fluorescent display after timing out. Unconnect the AC cord on the rear of the unit and leave for 5 minutes as I would normally do in the odd event this type of thing would occur. Hrrmmm... no bueno... and rinse/repeat 2-3 times, same results. OK, it's fairly safe to say there's somewhat of a pretty serious issue taking place here.
Triage time... so I removed the host cpu from it's rack home, and carried over to the bench for a deeper look. All the screws get removed, and the case opened for the appropriate access. Nothing unusual detected visually or olfactorily, and it's damn clean, very little in the way of dust, etc... OK, that's no surprise and positive as an initial recon effort. I'm already at a disadvantage tho, short-term, due to the fact I don't have an internal pc speaker available at the moment (go figure, ordered one tho), so this is only gonna actually get so far until the speaker arrives... whatever. I'm kinda pissed at this juncture, so I continue on working out what I can do in the interim. Again, I didn't have a real good feeling about this when I embarked on it and everything that follows essentially confirms what I was thinking. To wit...
First things first, what happens when we have a minimal amount of tech involved to boot... so, I removed the LAN, MIDI cards... essentially everything but the cpu, video card, one DIM of RAM and the floppy emulator... I removed the CF interface for the boot disk from the equation as well. So, it's a bare-bones pc that I should at least under the proper conditions have the ability to access BIOS should the POC test start to execute upon boot. I also placed a volt meter one of the power cables on the motherboard to see what kind of basic voltages are factored in here... flip the switch... same set of circumstances. The meter is reading 5.0VDC dead on for the +5 rail, with 12.12VDC coming from the 12 volt supply... OK, power supply is moved down the list of suspects, for now. So, having pulled my HDR out of it's rack home at the same time I was removing the D8B, I switched the video cards to see if that would potentially be the issue... nope. All the RAM between the D8B n HDR (5 DIM's x Hyundai 128GB PC-100) was also cycled (remove/reinstall/reboot) and nothing changed the results. That points me directly at the Celeron CPU and/or the motherboard itself... and I'm leaning towards the motherboard. However, that's nothing more than an educated guesstimate without having the ability to confirm/condemn things with the hardware codes that will inevitably be barked back thru the speaker. Either way, it's obviously far from ideal but I'll eat the elephant pragmatically one byte at a time til I get things mitigated. Does anyone have anything to add here while I pump the brakes on this until that internal speaker arrives? Just curious really, I'm fully aware I can realistically only do so much with any certainty without that diagnostic tool...
Yes indeed, I know, this sux... but it is what it is at this stage of the game...
Thanx in advance, y'all...
