MDR 24/96 Motherboard Replacement

[Old School]

Have to agree with Y-my-R on this one, and be sure that you don't connect those two little wires backwards, I seem to remember creating some problems with my HDR that way.

Have a blessed day,
Mike

[juanbanzai]

Still at it, gents... and just as frustrated as before. I have double-checked each connector multiple times; first making sure that no pins were bent, and second, making sure every connector was seated correctly. I even pulled the "surface" off the MDR I have and tried that on the HDR. With the exception of the backlight on the display not working, I got the same results...no boot-up past the Mackie welcome screen. The red/green two-pin connector was checked against the images I found in the service manual. Likewise with the white/blue two-pin connector that goes to one of the headers on the motherboard. I went through the BIOS settings again and what I have is a dead-on match for what's in the service manual. Not a single jumper is out of place. I checked the hard drive thoroughly prior to my installing the OS image and there isn't s single thing wrong with it. It's even VERY quiet considering its age. I've just run out of things to check.

There are a couple of things I simply don't understand. When I try to install an OS for the HDR from floppy, the drive boots up and begins to load whatever files are needed to get the install going, and I get a text message to that effect. The floppy then stops moving for a second or two and resumes for a couple of seconds then stops. All I see at that point is a blinking green asterisk. When I installed the OS image directly onto the hard drive, booting the HDR goes as far as the welcome screen and stops. I may be struggling with getting this beast working, but I DO know computers... especially DOS-era computers.

The floppy is failing on the install because the OS installer is looking for something it can't find. Whether it's a piece of hardware, or some setting on the hard drive I have no idea. But the installation stops because something is missing. I'm not prompted to say "yes" to formatting the drive or even to insert disk 2 as with the d8b install I performed. Likewise with booting the system from the image on the hard drive. The system stops because it's looking for something. It reminds me of playing an old DOS-based game like Duke Nukem on my old 486 computer back in the day. The computer would begin to boot up the game but would freeze because my "map disk" wasn't installed, or my sound card settings were messed up somehow. So all you would see is a full-screen graphic of "Duke" with his foot on a dead alien.

So I'm still left wondering if the the image of the OS for the HDR I downloaded is looking for a file or setting that WAS on the HDR the OS image was created from, but that same file, setting or piece of hardware is NOT in my HDR.

Other than that, I'm going to have no choice but to put the thing away and tell the powers that be that I can't bring the unit back to do any archiving. I've wasted a ton of time on this thing and I just don't know what else to try.

Aaron

[Old School]

Where did you get your floppies? This sounds like maybe your floppies, (one of them at least) may be corrupt. I have a known good hard drive with OS 1.4 installed on it, but that wont do you any good unless the bios chip on that HDR was upgraded. If you made the floppies yourself from the downloads page of this forum, did you extract them to your desktop and then click on the extracted file to let IT write itself to your floppy? (you can't just copy the extracted file to your floppy, it won't work that way). Please excuse me if you already know these things, as I'm just trying to eliminate possibilities.

Have a blessed day,
Mike

[juanbanzai]

Hi Mike. I really appreciate you running through even the most mundane and common-sense issues. It causes me to stop and think on what I did just to make sure I didn’t skip a step. I have hundreds of floppies either in my personal collection from back in the day, or brand new in a box floppies from work. I downloaded two different builds of the HDS OS, and both were successfully extracted and installed onto the two floppies. If at any point the disk-writing utility failed or hesitated while trying to copy the two files, I tossed the disk and started again until I got two floppies that took the data flawlessly.

I went through the “tools.Iini” file for both OS builds, making sure I had the format command set to “on.” I looked at whatever files I could on both disks to see if any settings were weird (like calling for a specific type of drive, etc) but without know what some of those files are supposed to contain in them, it’s all just gibberish.

Unfortunately, I don’t have another 20-30 gb hard drive I can try. I have several 40gb drives, but the BIOS won’t even see them even if I set a smaller partition on the drive.

[Old School]

I'm going to scrounge through the studio today to see if I can find a good drive less than 30 gig that has 1.3 installed on it. It's been almost 20 years since I started in business, so who knows.

Have a blessed day,
Mike

[juanbanzai]

Thanks very much, Mike. I really hate to give up on this HDR since we have dozens of removable drives with old production material from our studios on them. I need to somehow archive these productions. I just don't know where else to look for a possible cause for the boot failure.

One thing I forgot to mention is that this HDR of mine does have a removable drive in it. I've tried booting the unit with this drive both mounted and removed. When the BIOS posts the HDR, it detects the internal drive as a master, but it's never once detected the removable drive as a slave. I really didn't pay too much attention to the removeable drive not being detected because I thought the HDR's OS would see it after the unit booted up entirely.

As I've said before, I've gone over the BIOS settings, and the part concerning the drives is set for "Primary Master Auto", "Secondary Master Auto" as per the service manual. But the BIOS has never once detected the removable drive. Now, with that said, the internal drive is set as a MASTER. Should I have set it for MASTER/SLAVE PRESENT??

Correct if I'm wrong, but aren't those removable drives just another 20gb Western Digital drive mounted in a fancy Mackie case? Based on my current luck with old IDE drives around here, I'm wondering if that removable drive is roached and contributing to the problem.

Aaron

[Old School]

Hi Aaron,
It should detect the external drive and yes, those cases contain a regular (for the most part, it does have to have a seek time of less than 9 milliseconds) old hard drive. Sometimes the key will get wonky and not power on the external even though you turn it to the lock position. As for the jumper settings, I can't remember so I'll check how mine are set when I go to the studio.

Have a blessed day,
Mike

[juanbanzai]

Ugh. Sometimes you just want to scream bloody murder at the insanity of things. I just had a conversation with a gentleman here at work who, back in the day, used the d8b with the HDR at our FM station for all of his production work. He’s only here one day out of the week so I haven’t been able to talk to him before. But when I asked him about any removable drives he may have that need to be archived, our conversation turned to my difficulty in getting the HDR working.

I almost lost my mind when he said that the removable drives have to be inserted and the key LOCKED in order for the HDR to do anything! So even though I’ve got a removable drive installed, it’s not even powered up and recognized through the BIOS unless the drive is locked into the chassis with the key?!

Can anyone confirm if this is indeed true? I didn’t find any mentioned of the lock on the forum, but then again, I wasn’t looking for anything that “absurd.” But if that’s the case, it may be the solution to the problem I’m having.

Aaron

[Y-my-R]

That's not correct.

You can only use the drive in the external drive bay, if you insert the drive bay with the HDR off, then lock the drive bay with the key, and then boot the HDR up. IDE drives are not hot-swappable, that's why you need to boot when replacing drives in the drive bay.

However, you can absolutely record on an internal drive with the HDR and NO drive in the bay at all.

In fact, when I first got my HDR (and MDR), I didn't have anything to put in the drive bay and it still had the cover on it. I bought a used cartridge for the drive bay and put a harddrive in it, later on.

Long story short, the HDR/MDR is usable with the internal drive only, but you need to lock the external drive in the drive bay with the key, before you boot the HDR, if you want to use the external drive bay.

...goodness, and after typing this, I noticed that I missed a whole bunch of posts above it. I'll have to read later (gotta get back to work). But I read DUKE NUKEM - yeah, was playing that, too. At least we don't have to load anything into HIMEM to get the D8B OS to load (like you had to with ooooooooold DOS games... like Indiana Jones, for example, haha).

[juanbanzai]

I'm glad SOMEONE got the Duke Nukem bit. I still have the install floppies for that game. Loved it!

Anyway, I was able to get my hands on the keys for this thing, and lo and behold, the BIOS finally sees the removable drive. But that's it. Sure, it's another step in the right direction but the HDR still won't boot past the welcome screen. In fact, the error message it throws made me stop to think. While the screen on the HDR gives the "error 43", the error on the monitor says the "surface can not be found." So am I wrong in thinking I can boot the HDR as a stand-alone? Mine has three optical cards in it. Do the ins and outs from the cards have to be connected to the d8b?? Is the d8b the "surface" the HDR is looking for?!

If I can stop my wife from being pissed at the fact I spent 5 hours last night trying to get this working, I'm wondering if I can get the MDR working since that particular unit was purchased for taking out into the field to record shows or other productions. The MDR has three cards with 25-pin parallel connectors on them. Does there have to be a handshake between the recorder and the d8b in order for any of these things to work??

This is what really confuses me because when I first brought the HDR home, I fired it up and discovered that the bearings in the internal drive were shot thus it screamed as it spun up. There was no way I was going to use the HDR with a noise like that coming from the thing. Regardless... it BOOTED. I was able to see all the channel LEDs and the time-code counter lit up as well.

I'm missing something. I just wish I knew what it was.

Aaron