Battery Replacement

[davidlindland]

So I packed up my gear about 16 years ago and one of my business partners (who happens to be a producer) was bugging me to unpack it after all these years. I agreed and honestly, its some of the good that I am finding in this isolation insanity.

Well, I literally was getting butterflies opening all the boxes and I have to admit, it's a weird rush setting everything up again. Feeling quite thankful with the exception of I cannot remember Sh*t...lol.

The Board will not boot so just wondering if any of you out there (that are smarter than I) would have any insights. I never had an issue when using back in the day and everything was stored properly. I tried to press the delete button in start-up but cannot get to the bios. The monitor will not kick on either, so just hoping I can get some ideas as to the potential fixes.
Thanks so much and I hope everyone is healthy.

DPL

[Jondav1120]

Hi David, and welcome to the forum. We are all well here......

Do you get any signs of life when you switch on? CPU Cooling fan running? Any sound of the HDD spinning up? Activity on the floppy disk drive? Rude solo light on the board?
You should also get some text on the VFD (can't remember offhand what it is.....but if the CPU is not booting, then ultimately it should change to the well known "Error 43....Host did not boot" message.
As a first step I'd pop the lid off the CPU and pull the Bios battery out, leave it for ten minutes or so and try a new battery. One of my boards did something very similar a long time back. that turned out to be a failing Bios battery (the bios memory that is maintained by the battery seemed to have got so corrupted by the failing battery that the motherboard would not even start the bios routines....)
You will then need to load the Bios defaults depending upon which motherboard you have......details here or here.
To determine which motherboard you have.....go here.

Trust you get it working!

Stay safe...

John

[davidlindland]

John,
Thank you so much! Rude Solo light was on but that was it. I did go open everything up and replace the battery, so will start there. Thank you again for the suggestions!

[Jondav1120]

Hi David,

Rude Solo light was on but that was it

That's a bit odd.....as I mentioned earlier, you should see some text on the VFD. As I understand it, this is the firmware on the Brain board booting up and then awaiting the actual control firmware download from the CPU. If it doesn't see this firmware download from the CPU then it eventually displays the "Error 43" message.
If you are not getting any text, either the VFD is not working or the Brain board is not booting properly!

Regards

John

[davidlindland]

So I was finally able to find a new battery in a store and replaced in the D8B (people hoarding those too? lol). Unfortunately,stilll no luck.

Rude Solo light on, fan working, fader move very quickly at startup, but the display on the board just says "Waiting for host" No monitor or response from keyboard. Any thoughts?

Thanks for any suggestions!

[Jondav1120]

Hi David,

Sounds as though the desk is doing what it should. That "Waiting for host" message is part of the normal start up routine. If looks as though your problem is within the CPU. It is a normal (although pretty old now) motherboard in there. Something is stopping it from even getting to the bios routines.
I'd suggest unplugging as much as you can from the motherboard. Start with the ribbon cables to the floppy drive and the hard disk drive, remove the ethernet and midi cards, unplug the mouse and keyboard connections and try to boot it.
Hopefully, with just the graphics card and the memory installed it should boot as far as the BIOS. If it does, then start plugging components back in until it fails again.

Regards

John