[CCTECH] AT&T PC7300 / UnixPC is ill! :(

Hi all! :) Today, I acquired a PC7300. Alas, the poor fellow seems to have a rather large malady of some type. I've never had much experience with these beasts before, so much of what I say goes on the word of the last owner. 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 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. :) 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 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. Will see if I can dig up a HH ST-506 drive somewhere soon. The power supply looked OK... one very slightly mad looking / bulging cap, but nothing overtly broken. (My DMM is in the mail at the moment, so I wasn't really able to test much. :() The only other thing I 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. Any suggestions as to what is making this poor machine act as it does would be very, very much appreciated. :) Can't wait to get it running at some point... it looks like such a nifty box. Thanks kindly! :) Andy _____________________ groovelists(a)yahoo.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ cctech mailing list cctech(a)classiccmp.org http://www.classiccmp.org/mailman/listinfo/cctech