A3000 Hardware Test Program Needed

[98PaceCar]

Hi All,

In my quest to rebuild the used A3000 I just picked up, I've been doing a lot of general playing around. Nothing major, just installing small apps and seeing what I remember. The only real problem I'm having right now is a rash of Guru errors. Normally I would blame them on the software, but they are very inconsistant. Sometimes I'll just be typing in a shell or clicking on an icon in the WB. About an hour ago the machine wouldn't boot from it's HD and the caps lock key would just flash if I booted from floppy. Didn't change anything, just left it off for a bit and it came back up. The errors I'm getting are typically 8000 000x (seeing a lot of 4 and 5 errors in particular).

Is there any software I can get that will let me check out the hardware thoroughly? The system is an A3000 desktop with 2 mb chip, 8 mb fast, 2.1 gb hd, external scsi cdrom, xsurf 2, running 2.04 roms with wb 2.1, and ASIMCDFS. I've run disk salv on the hd and no errors were reported (even though the system has complained about bad sectors a time or two). The hard drive is terminated as use power from drive and the cdrom has an active external terminator on it.

I'm starting to get a bit frustrated with the inconsistencies I'm seeing and any help will be much appreciated. I've got snoopdos on there if seeing a log file of my boot will help. I'm in the middle of trying to get the demo of Genesis installed so I can use the X-Surf, so it's a bit torn up right now!

Thanks in advance,
Darren

[98PaceCar]

Just a bit more info.. I've tried running both with and without the external cdrom attached with the same results. I've verified that the motherboard does not have any resistor packs installed.

Also, I was trying to install the demo of Genesis and getting some strange results. It was telling me that it couldn't find installer. That part is consistent and I'm sure my fault, but one time I would hit retry and it would guru with an 8000 000b. The next time, I could hit retry a couple times and it would be fine. Another time, I would hit retry once or twice and it would guru with an 8000 0004.

Very strange...

[98PaceCar]

Thanks for the advice guys. I am planning on cleaning all the chips and reseating everything sometime this weekend. Hopefully that will clear things up..

What revision of Buster should I be looking for? If that's a potential fix then I'm all for it!!

Thanks,
Darren

[98PaceCar]

Just found a website with something called an A3000 Burn In Disk. I assume this is just like a burn in test disk, something that just runs tests over and over until it is either stopped or fails. Anyone know of any reason to not do this?

Thx,
98PaceCar

[98PaceCar]

Another update! I've been running the burn in program I found and it's reporting back (after about 120 some odd cycles) that the fast ram has a failure. Makes sense as this would explain the random failures. I'm going to try the cleaning method first. If that doesn't work, I have a couple old memory cards that I think I can use the ram from. It's not zip ram, but rather 256X4 dram in a dip. The exact model number is either HY51C4256S-10 or HY534256S-70. Will either of these be acceptable? I guess I could swap back half of the chip ram and go to a 2 mb config for the time being.

If it does turn out that I have a ram problem, what is my best approach? I've found one place online that has the 1X4 zips, but they want $5 a piece. That's $160 to fully populate the machine or $80 to get to where I am now. Assuming I have one or two bad chips and can isolate which ones they are (any advice on how to do this??), is it worth it to try to fully populate the on board slots or just save my pennies for an accellerator board that will allow me to use more traditional ram?

TIA,
98PaceCar

[98PaceCar]

I've made a bit of a discovery about my random guru problem. I pulled all of the fast ram out and started running burn in loops. It's working like a champ! So I decided to clean the legs on all the zips I pulled out. While I was doing that, I decided to check the numbers on them to make sure they are what they are supposed to be. Turns out I have 8 HM514400AZ8 chips and 8 HM514402AZ8. Half static and half page. I've been reading ont he net and I've seen both sides of the story.. either mix them with the page mode zips in the first bank or don't mix them. Can anyone shed any light on this discussion?

I'm going to slap half of them back in and see what happens, then probably the other half after I'm happy that the first set is working. I hate to scarifice half of my fast ram, but I guess if it gets me stability it's worth it!

TIA,
98PaceCar

[98PaceCar]

Also noticed that jumber 851 (ram speed) is set to 16 as opposed to 25. I can't imagine that would hurt anything, but it is a 25 mhz system, so wouldn't 25 be the appropriate setting?

Thx,
98PaceCar

[98PaceCar]

Framiga,

That's what I thought! I went ahead and switched it over, put all the ram back in (page mode chips in the first bank and static mode in the second bank), and fired up the burn in. It's been through 4 loops so far and is working great! It was crashing during the first loop before, so it's a great improvement.

Thanks for the advice!
98PaceCar