by LoveHate » Sat Jul 11, 2015 7:51 pm
I have a pretty thorniy issue here:
My d8b started with the thumping sound upon boot one day, same day I'd used it earlier. In the past I found that by checking the connection of the server to the board the noise went away and I was able to proceed. In fact, it got to the point that over the 16 years I've been using the board all I really had to do was move the cable around and the board would work fine, sometimes for years before again exhibiting this problem. Yesterday the unit would not reboot. Mine is an earlier board (166) so I checked the BIOS settings and it would still not boot. I reloaded the latest version of Version 3 build 224 and that got the board to enter the BIOS again but it would exhibit the message IDE-0...ok BOOT FAIL. I changed the internal battery and checked to see if all the internal visible connections were okay - nothing burnt, nothing disconnected. The unit would no longer turn on after that. I could see the fan twitch everytime I turned on the power switch but nothing else happened. I worked on this for hours, carefully disconnecting all the connectors cleaning pins with DeOx on a swab and tried to reboot after every connector. It never powered up again.
Next I removed that hard drive and put it into another enclosure and backed up all its files. I had a spare server so I brought that out and it booted up with Version 5. I copied all of its contents to another drive as well. Next I started porting via FTP all the files from the backup of my previous hard drive with V3 on it onto this new server running V5.1. The FTP porting would work fine for about 45 sec and then just disconnect. I could get it to work again after rebooting. I spent hours transferring the files from my original drive onto the spare server. After I'd gotten everything transferred I tried booting up old projects and they came up but with weird problems: in one case the d8b didn't output on one side. Reboot and it would. It didn't retain the User presets for effects. I then decided to see how it would run with the hard drive from my disabled unit. I installed that and it would not boot. It would check for hard drives, recognize the Primary Master and then read: CMOSchecksum error - Defaults loaded. Additionally, even though it reads Press F1 to continue, DEL to enter SETUP there was no response from either key. Could not reboot with Ctrl+Alt+Del. I replaced the drive with V3 on it back to the drive that was in it originally, loaded with V5.1. Same condition.
I next downloaded DOS 6.22 from Bootdisk and put that on a newly formatted floppy. The server doesnt check the floppy upon booting so I'm kinda stuck outside the box. I can't enter the SETUP menu to change the BIOS or even use the rescue program on the floppy. Where can I go from here?