BIOS set itself to default

[LoveHate]

I was one of the first one's on my block to buy a d8b and later two HDRs. As an extremely active engineer/composer/producer I have had occasion to work on these Mackie units enough to know my way around their insides. I regularly change the batts whether they need it or not; I vaccuum any dust that gets in through the vents and keep my work area clean; I try to maintain the console and decks operability by cloning and replacing the hard drives when they need it so I am not a newbie but my knowledge of computers is pretty thin when it comes to certain issues. I'm more an operator than a tech so I could use some help from better educated minds than my own. I have a rather thorny issue here:

My d8b started with the thumping sound upon boot one day, same day I'd used it earlier with no incident. In the past I found that by checking the connection of the cable 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 console all I really had to do was move the cable around behind it and the board would work fine, sometimes for years before again exhibiting this problem. Yesterday the unit would not boot for the second time in a day. Mine is an earlier board (166) so I checked the BIOS settings and it would still not boot. I reloaded the last version of V3 build 224 on floppies 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 even though it was just a tad low and checked if all the visible internal connections were okay - nothing burnt, nothing disconnected. The unit would no longer turn on after that. I could see the fan twitch every time I turned on the power switch but nothing else happened. I worked on this for hours, carefully disconnecting each connector outside the power supply, cleaning pins with DeOx on a swab and replacing the connector, then tried to reboot. It never powered up again.

Next I removed that hard drive and put it into another enclosure and backed up all its files on my PC. The drive came right up and seems fine. I had a spare server and console in storage so I brought that out and it booted up with Version 5, loaded by its previous owner. I immediately 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 onto this new server running V5.1. Using Master Commander as the FTP app the porting would work as usual for about 45 sec and then disconnect. I could get it to work again after rebooting the d8b. I spent hours transferring the files from my original drive onto the drive in the spare server. After I'd gotten all my mix files transferred I tried booting up old projects and they loaded 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 this newer board 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 but then read: CMOS checksum 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. The keyboard seemed to do nothing. I then swapped the drive with V3 on it with the drive that was in it originally, loaded with V5.1. Same condition.

I went online and downloaded DOS 6.22 from Bootdisk and put that on a newly formatted floppy. The server doesn't check the floppy upon booting (no green light). I cannot get to the BIOS to reset for the new board 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. Any idea where I can go from here?

[Old School]

Hi,
I like you am more of an audio guy than a tech, but in my humble opinion you need a new motherboard.

Have a blessed day in Christ,
Mike Whitley