Newbie needs help!! 3000 with acid damage..

[DanDude]

@KennyR

===ALL=== batteries carry acid except memory capacitors.  Memory capacitors are THE next best thing to replacing batteries.

[KennyR]

@Dandude

===ALL=== batteries carry acid except memory capacitors. Memory capacitors are THE next best thing to replacing batteries.

No they don't. Only lead-acid batteries such as car batteries have acid inside. In fact, many batteries are alkaline, not acid. Ni-Cd batteries like those used in most older clock "coin" batteries actually have sodium hydroxide as an electrolyte, a powerful alkali.

[98PaceCar]

Ok, I've got some isopropyl alcohol at home, so I can re-do it with that. I don't think any of the components were damaged, but until I get it all back together I won't know for sure. The damage is pretty much isolated to the negative side of the battery and the surrounding area where there isn't too much to damage.

[DanDude]

@KennyR

OK, acid or not, they still contain harmful effects that can destroy the board, right?

http://www.lightuptheworld.org/environmentbattery.html

[KennyR]

Dandude wrote:

OK, acid or not, they still contain harmful effects that can destroy the board, right?

Sure. They do to your circuit boards what they should be doing inside the battery - reacting. Most real acids won't attack copper or lead-solder anyway. ;-)

[N7VQM]

KapitanKlystron wrote:
 The coating on the board ( called a conformal coating) is either polyurethane or an epoxy resin.

I don't think C= had any boards conformal coated.  It can be expensive to conformal coat a large board and it's not needed for home electronics.  It also makes repairs a real pain.  From what I remember working in electronics manufacturing, the top and bottoms of PWB's are called laminates.  When these layers are gone or have detached from the PWB, the boards is said to have delaminated.  

[miles]

Darren,

The A3000 keeps it's SCSI settings in battery backed up memory,
setbatt can restore these settings.

They are:

SCSI Preferences,

Long SCSI Timeout (Seacrate Mode)
Synchronous Transfer
Support Multiple LUNs
Host Adapter

It might happen that you need to reset these, if I power off my A3000
I have to reset SCSI Synchronous Transfer.  This does not stop my
A3000 from booting though.

For Workbench, what ROMs do you have?
The A3000 has 3 types.  1.4 boot roms that softkick a rom image from
hard drive, 2 roms that do not need a hard drive installed rom image
and 3.1 roms, which I have and is the best option.

Workbench 2 will install on 2 and 3 roms, boot from floppy and use
hard drive toolbox to set your hard drive if needed (you can just copy
the boot floppy to hard drive and change s:startup-sequence and
user-startup to point to hard drive insted of floppy, if needed).

With 1.4 roms you will need to set your hard drive up with hard drive
toolbox (from your install disks), call the boot hard drive partition
wb_2.x in hard drive toolbox  and set the drives boot partition to
FFS with out DC or international checked.  Your KickStart image should
be in DEVS:  This is because V.36 boot roms boot the machine and look
for a hard drive  called wb_2.x to find a kickstart 2.x or 3.x rom
image then reboot using  the hard drive kickstart.  The kickstart
image must be for a A3000.

Have a look at my website, it is about the A3000.  Feel free to email
me :-)

Others:

CRC 2.26 (or another electrical component cleaner) works wonders for
cleaning the white gunk from a leaking battery  off your computer.
Wiped it once years ago, no gunk "growback".  We used this (crc 2.26)
to clean the white gunk off telephone terminals on telephone poles
(the spiders did not like it though!).  It works, is safe, does not
contain a lube like crc 5.56 or wd40 does and you can keep the rest of
the can in the car for battery terminals etc.  :-)

[KapitanKlystron]

@N7VQM

You are right about that I took a look at my A2000 motherboard and It was not coated. I guess force of habit from working on military and industrial  circuit cards.  Your'e right about coatings making repairs a pain. Sometimes you spend more time removing and replacing coatings than resoldering. :-)

[98PaceCar]

Miles,

It's a revision 9 motherboard and I do remember seeing 2 roms that were labeled 2.04.  So it looks like I will be ok to boot from the floppies I already have!! Hooray!! Now I just need to hold out till my keyboard gets here (it's in a fedex truck right now) and I'll be in business!

On a side note, I decided I should pull the 501 cards out of both of my 500's, just in case. Sure enough, they are furry too...  :-o

Looks like I've got some more cleaning to get done!

I'll check out your site. Thanks for the info!

Darren

[miles]

Darren,

2.04 is good!  When I got my A3000 I had 1.4 softkicked to 3.1 (I
had a A1200 before that) and I changed my boot partitions name to sys
as I thought wb_2.x looked "messy", took a while to figure out why it
would no longer boot!

The 501s I have are furry as are old 486s, those batterys were a bad
idea :-(

Going through a major rework on the site, been really busy lately!

Finally got some spare time now :-)
Got shapeshifter on the net and am setting up networking to a pc (for
deathmatched doom and quake) that is serial linked to a A600, that
will (when I can find a cheap one) be parnetted to a A1200 for AGA
only games.

[98PaceCar]

Miles,

Awesome! Some good news finally!!

There's some great info on your site. Now that I'm home, I'll have to surf all of it. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I completely missed the obvious link to your page. I guess it was too obvious!!

Darren

[98PaceCar]

DanDude,

I just put some pics of the damage out on my pic site. They are kinda big, but you can see all the damage in them. If they are too big, let me know and I'll resize them.

www.pbase.com/darrenes/a3000

Thanks for your advice! I used some isopropyl alcohol on it when I got home. I've wiped it all off and am just letting it sit for a while before I do anything else. I'll probably hit it with a blow dryer on no heat to blow out anything that's left later.

Oh yea, the pics are after I used the alcohol on it.

Thanks!
Darren

[amigakid]

Make sure u stay grounded as not to short out anything (else) on the mb.  Also when u are done cleaning up the spill make sure u cover the bare copper.  They have a green cover liquid that u can go buy at a electronics store for it, forgot what it was called tho (brainfart:).  

[DanDude]

no problem!
 :-)