Hello NeXT Community: I just uploaded some useful NeXT Dimension board troubleshooting diagnostic utilities courtesy of Mike Paquette. Thank you Mike.
Be sure not to unplug the NeXT Cube or unseat the Dimension board or have a hard shutdown when running any of these utilities as it will cause very BAD damage to the Dimension board.
http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/Diagnostic_Utilities/DimensionBoard/ PS Mike: I've talked with Nitro the top admin and we would like to offer you an FTP directory on the NeXT archive as you have a lot of great NeXT stuff that will help the NeXT community, please feel free to PM me and we will figure it out. If you have a name in mind perhaps Paquettes guru corner ... I've always appreciated the help even way way way back thanks .
A read me file to add to the diagnostics with disclaimer and any additional troubleshooting tips, best approach with warnings or gotchas would be of great help as well and I'll upload it.
Best regards Rob Blessin :D
I would appreciate it *a lot* if someone would post the instructions for these tools.
I have two boards; one if working nicely, and the other is not.
Running "./NDinfo" reveals "failure(5)" on the second board, "./NDromcheck" reports the same value as the known good board.
But the rest of the tools reports errors when run. Do they require a switch/parameter or are they run in some special way?
The LED on the dud Dimension flashes five times, pauses briefly and repeats. This *should* indicate a RAM error, but this behaviour also happens with the RAM from the good board. And *all* my RAM is *always* checked with my trusty old SimCheck device.
I need help. Please.
Have you redone the caps yet? I've fixed this behavior with a recap and a good cleaning in the past.
No, I have not. Perhaps I should. I have recapped a few Macintosh motherboards in the past, so shouldn't be too hard.
I also have a NOS Optical drive without any sign of leakage whatsoever, that I think I should recap before using.
Thanks!
The dimension is a quick and easy job. If you've done a mac logic board you should have no trouble.
5 LED blinks is indeed a DRAM failure, but the problem doesn't have to be in the RAM parts. Anything that glitches data or address traffic on the memory bus, or a failure that just blocks memory I/O from happening, will trigger that POST error.
Capacitors are a pretty good suspect.
So did anyone else figure out how to use these tools?