I’m avoiding to comment on this thread, since we could quickly get into a “too many cooks” situation, where everyone suggests different things, and it would get really hard for Pino68 to follow all the separate trains of thought…
I thought I’d jump in for a moment anyway, in attempt to straighten out where this is currently at, and what the next logical steps for troubleshooting would be (at least in my opinion).
Maybe I should mention at this point, that I did Tech Support for music technology companies for much of my professional life (ran the support departments at multiple MI companies and did phone/e-mail support before that).
A general principle when doing support, is always to first try to troubleshoot with the materials available, since a suggestion to purchase new or additional hardware could potentially always be wasted money, if the product/device has a deeper defect that would require component level repair. (If you suggest to buy additional hardware while doing support for an equipment manufacturer, but it turns out that something with the device itself is defective that isn’t solvable with these additional purchases, the company becomes liable for suggesting these expenses… so, purchasing something is always a last resort, that comes with verbal disclaimers (…purchase at your own risk, no guaranteed solution, blah blah).
So, in my opinion, rather than buying all new stuff at the time when this was suggested, it would have been preferable to try to get the D8B working with existing hardware first, to make sure that there isn’t something else broken, that may make repairs uneconomical. For example, if we’d get into a territory where power supply components would need to be swapped out, that at least IMO, require a certain level of expertise to be able to do that safely… (at least I personally have a lot of respect of PSU’s and would not recommend to mess with them, if you’re not at least a electronics-repair enthusiast who knows how to use a multi-meter and work on live voltages, already).
Long story short - before you buy anything else, Pino, I think we FIRST need to get your D8B back to where it was at the beginning of the troubleshooting process. Meaning, the main objective should be to get the Mackie OS re-installed properly, so you can at least boot up. If you STILL get the lock-up at that point, we’ll deal with it from there.
But again… before you replace any more hardware, we need to get to a point where we can try a few things… and for that, it would be good to get the D8B to boot up again, first. So, my suggestion would be, to focus on getting the Mackie OS back on your harddrive (or CF card, if you have that available now). Let’s tackle the “D8B locks up” as a separate issue after that (…and let’s safe potential purchases of even more new hardware - for example a power supply component - for even later).
So, in order to be able to continue, I need to get a better understanding of the status where this is currently at, Pino.
Is the current status still, that you had tried to install the Mackie OS 5.1 from floppy disks to a CF card, but got this error at the end? “Error: volume not boot patched. Contact tech support”
If the answer is “Yes” - then my first guess would be that you did not set the first D8B install floppy disk (or “emulated” floppy disk), to format the drive your installing to when doing so. This is what you’d have to do in this case:
On the first D8B installation floppy disk (or “virtual” emulated floppy disk) find the “Tools.ini” file and open it with a text editor, such as Wordpad or TextEdit, etc. If it’s not already there, add a new line that says this:
format:on
Here’s the document where that’s described in detail:
https://www.sonido-7.com/d8b/files/d8b_ ... ocdure.pdfWith this in place, the D8B should prompt to format the harddrive (aka CF card) when you start the D8B from that floppy disk. I personally have NOT found a way to get the boot sector on the D8B drive to be configured correctly, when doing the formatting from a computer utility like fdisk on PC or Disk Utility on the Mac (or any other disc management program for that matter).
It’s often necessary to use fdisk etc. to initially format the drive to get the D8B installer to find it and be able to format it again in it’s own way… but fdisk etc. doesn’t allow to skip the D8B formatting step.
If the drive isn’t already D8B formatted, the method above is the ONLY way to do this… so, if you didn’t do this, yet, it makes sense that it didn’t work.
Pino - please ignore what I’ll say next. Let’s try to get this working with your floppy emulator and floppy disc images. What I’m saying below is an alternative that would NOT make things easier for you at this point. But we can fall back on it, if we somehow can’t get the floppy emulator approach working.
So… an alternative approach to getting the Mackie OS on a harddrive or CF card, INCLUDING the ever-important boot sector, is to “clone” a working D8B boot drive as a file you can store as a backup. If you have that, you can always restore such a backup to a new drive or CF card.
And to answer Phil’s question: Yes, absolutely. You can take a working D8B drive (even a spinning one), clone it (incl. the boot sector) and restore it to another drive, including to CF drives, and then boot the D8B from that. That’s how I always do it. When I mentioned that it works for me on a 32GB CF the other day, this was from a clone I pulled from a spinning drive, using “Clonezilla."
However, there’s a misconception which applications work for that. Some apps “claim” to make a 1:1 copy of a drive but do NOT! Many such apps don’t clone a drive “raw”, but just clone partitions etc., and often leave out the boot sector, that is essential to this working for a D8B clone. So, apps like CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) or SuperDuper or various other “Backup” apps will NOT work (at least not from my experience). I don’t recall, but I think “DD” under command line in Unix/Linux also doesn’t do a “raw” clone - I didn’t have success with that approach either.
Most of these “backup” apps run from modern operating systems and can’t reach the boot sector (or for more modern computers, they usually also don’t backup the EFI… which is kind of a modern take on the boot sector).
The one app that is completely free and works great to clone including the boot sector (and/or EFI) is “Clonezilla”. However, it’s “command line only” and you have to create a USB thumbdrive to boot a (PC) computer via Clonezilla - then you can choose which source drive to copy to which destination drive from a “command line” interface. This will copy the entire disk incl. the boot sector.
However, if you accidentally select your Windows drive as the destination drive (which is easy to do… the drives appear by their model number, not by their names, so you better make note of your harddrive makes/models and capacity before you start), it will overwrite your Windows installation, so you have to be extremely careful.
…and since I mentioned Norton Ghost: This “used to be” the most elegant solution while it existed, since you could run it from within Windows, but it would STILL let you copy entire drives including the boot sector, and without having to risk erasing your Windows installation (…although you could still manage to do that, if not careful. It’s not “completely” fool proof. But much harder to screw yourself over than with Clonezilla).
I don’t remember with which version of Norton this wasn’t working quite as easily anymore (Ghost 2002 or 2003 or something was problematic… should be older than that)… but if you happen to have an even older version of Ghost (early versions also didn’t need a serial number for authorization… so if you can “find” one, it could be “free” haha), then you could clone D8B drives from computers up to Windows XP (I’d think… but have only tried in Win98, recently).
At least if cloned this way, a 32GB CF card will work in the D8B (the BIOS recognizes it in my “old board” D8B, so it should be good with the new board as well). I could imagine that the floppy installer itself can’t handle 32GB large drives, but if a clone of a smaller drive is written to the 32GB CF, it will boot up without issue. (I could imagine that creating smaller partitions on the CF card before attempting to install from the D8B floppies, might also help the installer to recognize the device… but since the boot-sector gets re-written, this might still fail when trying to install/format via floppy, not sure. Cloning to 32GB CF works, though).
I think somewhere in the database (or maybe it was suggested by someone here on the forum) is a description how to clone and restore a drive via Macrium Reflect (another backup/clone app). I did this when I first got my D8B, and this works just fine as well! However, if I recall right, then the “free” version expired at some point (so, really just a “trial version” not a true “free” version), and since I had other options for cloning (see above), I didn’t purchase but found a different “free” way to clone the drive.
Oh… and about RJH Music’s suggestion that the original issue may be power supply related - that is entirely possible. But as mentioned at the beginning of this post, I think we first need to get Pino’s D8B back to a point where we can see if the original symptom still exists, and then eliminate all other possible causes that don’t cost anything. If that fails and we run out of options, that’s where I’d start exploring hardware failures (…and which is why I have more than one device for a lot of these old “project” things - I have 3 D8Bs, with 2 of them mostly for parts and troubleshooting. The best way to troubleshoot, is always to try with another unit to help with the process of elimination, until you know exactly what’s working in the one unit, that isn’t in the other).
Anyway, sorry about the long post… and again, I’m don’t mean to hi-jack this, but since this goes into the direction of having Pino buy more hardware before we explored all “free” troubleshooting options, I felt I should interject for a moment. I hope that’s OK.
As always, best of luck with these next steps!
