12 Jun
2002
12 Jun
'02
7:13 a.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Berg [mailto:groovelists@yahoo.com]
Today, I acquired a PC7300. Alas, the poor fellow
seems to have a rather large malady of some type. I've
It will make you feel better to know that they're very sturdy.
Evidently, before one of these machines first boots
up, it displays a few rectangular characters in the
upper left hand corner of the screen. It then proceeds
to its boot screen. (And then OS loading and whatnot
Yes. The rectangles come from ROM, the boot screen comes
from the on-disk loader. (I think) It's really
trying to
boot, from the sound of it.
Put a diagnostic disk in the floppy drive and see what happens.
If you've got not diagnostic disk, that's your first problem ;)
if all is well.) My machine just sits there and
displays rectangle after rectangle after rectangle. No
boot screen ever appears. The machine was working when
put away for storage when put away a few months ago,
but refused to boot when it came out. I guess that
leaves it at the point that I got it. :)
Chances are that it's the disk. You'll find that it's a
normal ST-506 (Is it 506? -- "MFM") disk. If you find that
the disk really is toasted, you can get pretty much any
half-height drive and replace it. They came with Miniscribe
lots of the time. I've replaced them with Seagate and Rodime
drives without trouble. Anything else is also likely to
work.
I managed, with a bit of yanking about, to get it
disassembled, down to the motherboard, as per the 3b1
FAQ. I got some of the big dust out and reseated all
of the seatable chips. There didn't seem to be any
major damage anywhere... one of the fans had a cut
line which I repaired, but there was no evidence of
any type of overheating. Most socketed chips were
Careful there. There was a procedure somewhere describing
how to disconnect the thermister from the fans, in order
to _keep_ the system from overheating ;) Make sure that
line was one of the lines that powers the fan.
Of course, my system, and my fiancee's system, are both
fine without having had that done.
reseated, everything was powered on once again, and
the same thing seems to happen. :( The rectangles
appear, the floppy drive sits and spins, and the hard
drive spins up and sits there. There is a loud
beep/click type sound, which I'd figured to be the
heads unparking themselves. When the hard drive cable
is removed, the machine freezes at one rectangle, so
was thinking it could be something along those lines.
As I was saying, it could just be a bad disk.
think I can report are that the four indicator LEDs
are at a constant on state - could also be normal for
this part of the boot cycle for this machine, too.
I think so, but my memory is fuzzy.
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
"Confutatis maledictus, flammis acribus addictus, voca me cum
benedictis. Oro supplex et acclinis, cor contritunt quasi
cinis, gere curarn mei finis." -Requiem