MDR 24/96 Motherboard Replacement

[Old School]

Hi Aaron,
The jumpers on the internal drives I have are all set to "master" and the external ones are mixed, some set to master and some to "cable select", but they all work. I do have a couple of drives under 30GB , but both have OS 1.4 installed. Does anyone remember whether upgrading the bios was necessary to run 1.4, or will it work without the new chip as long as the drive is less than 32gb? Anyway, if you think it would help, I would be willing to loan you the drive, but I will want it back. Just let me know. Also, sometimes the "screaming" is not from the hard drive, but from the fan on the poccessor. Blow it out with compressed air and add a drop of lubricant always fixed it for me.

Have a blessed day,
Mike

[juanbanzai]

Thanks for getting back to me, Mike.

First, let me tell you that it’s definitely the drive that’s got the noise. In fact, I found 5 or 6 drives in our shop that were labeled “Mackie” and each one was bad. None of them would be detected by the BIOS of a computer we tested them in, nor would they be detected by the IDE to USB adapter I have. As soon as the power up, Windows says they need to be formatted. The Aomei partition program doesn’t even detect them.

The drive that’s in the HDR now is a WD200 and there are no jumper settings printed on the label. With nothing else to lose, I tried the jumper in various spots with varying results. Regardless, even if the BIOS found both drives, the system still wouldn’t boot.

Thanks for the offer of the hard drive. That’s really spot-on nice. However, I can’t even get OS 1.3 or 1.4 to install from a floppy. So there could still be a problem even if I make an image of your drive… which would probably be a much easier idea rather than shipping a drive.

I suppose I could try and find another drive here in order to attempt a clean OS instal, but 20 or 30gb drives are becoming a scarcity now.

Do you have any thoughts on what I said in my previous post about the HDR being connected to the d8b via the optical cables? Is that a necessity in order for the unit to boot up?

[Y-my-R]

I still don't have a great idea what's going on, but thought I'd try to clear up or suggest a few things related to what was mentioned above:

- The Internal Drive in the HDR is usually Master on the first IDE controller (IDE-0)
- The Drive Bay in the HDR is usually Master on the second IDE controller (IDE-1)
- None of these drives is usually set to Slave.

- Some IDE drives allows to limit their capacity by setting a jumper in a funny way (usually sideways). Not all IDE drives do this, but if you look up the model name and something like "capacity limit jumper position" you might find some clues about these drives online.

- I/O cards with ONLY DB25 connectors on them, can either be AES/EBU cards, or Analog cards. I think the AES/EBU only have one DB25 connector on it (one handles all digital I/O for 8 channels), while analog cards have a separate DB25 connector for the 8 inputs, and another for the 8 outputs.

- The cards in the D8B and HDR need to have the same connector type on it to talk to each other. A DB25 port on a DIO-8 card, for example, is TDIF (there's also an additional pair of ADAT optical ports on DIO-8 cards) and will not work with the DB25 connector on an analog card or on a AES/EBU card. To test functionality, since you have 3 cards, you could put a card of the same type into the D8B and into the HDR to see if they talk to each other (once the D8B boots).
There's nothing specific to the ports that needs to be set up, but you need to set the Word Clock properly for Master/Slave between the D8B and HDR.

- If you intend to keep that HDR, you can convert the internal drive to a CF card and install a different drive bay, to use with an SSD drive. It's easier to still find 32 GB CF cards... and if you want to use the HDR after your done archiving those drives, it would be much quieter without any spinning drives in it.
My HDR is converted that way... the loudest thing now, are the CPU and PSU fans (and I have quieter ones in those spots, as well). Here's the part you'd need to run SSD drives with the HDR... other models suggested on here before, did NOT Work out for me:
https://tinyurl.com/39z2c5h5

- Not today, but I could try to clone my HDR CF drive and upload it somewhere. Do you need that in Aomei format, or are there any other apps like that, that you work with (Norton Ghost, and CloneZilla worked well for me... I don't recall if I ever tried Aomei... some of these apps don't write the boot sector right, which would then prevent boot... but if you got to the green asterisk or even a GUI of sorts, then it seems that the boot sector was correctly written... or it would just give some sort of boot error right after looking for the harddrive, IMO.

- Is there any data you need to keep on the drives you tried, that didn't get recognized? If not, I'd just let Windows format them when being prompted to see how that goes (format with FAT16 or FAT32, NOT with NTFS or newer). I think after that, you might have a slightly better chance of the drive being seen by the D8B installer.

Interesting that the WD200 drive still works. Western Digital were the LEAST reliable for me, and I stopped buying them back in the day, since they died on me so frequently. Strange that out of all drives, that the one that survived for you (although... I think the 650 MB drive from my first computer is a Western Digital and I still have that and it also still works, haha).

[Old School]

Hi All.
The HDR will boot without being connected to anything else in my experience. I was just thinking that if you had the drive and it still wouldn't boot, you could eliminate the drives as the problem. Funny about the drives and how different people have different experiences. I have had a LOT of WD drives and never had one fail. I have had maxtor's that failed and IBM's that failed (although I still have the original IBM that came with my first HDR in 2003 and it still boots!) but the most problematic for me has been Hitachi, several failures, all catastrophic. But I digress, anyway the offer stands if you decide you want to try the drive.

Have a blessed day,
Mike

[juanbanzai]

I really appreciate all the help, gents. However, I really think I’m at the “rail cap fail” now. When I mentioned it the other day, I let the d8b cool off for an hour while reseating the power cable. Powered it back on… and success! No more daft behavior.

However, in the middle of a listening session this evening, the thumping, clicking, popping, and jumping of some of the meters started back up again. It’s at the point now where I have to start weighing my options. I’ve repaired dozens of other pieces of gear (radios, stereos, etc.) in the past, but I don’t have the equipment or the eyes to tackle SMDs without cursing the gods at the same time. Yes, this Mackie gear was going to be recycled by my company, and I don’t have a problem throwing some money at it. What I don’t want to toss at it is time. I’ve spent the last four days trying to get the HDR working with no success… and now with being faced with a rail cap failure, I’m not sure I want to get into tearing out the brain board to find and replace ALL the rail caps. Opening the d8b looks like a nightmare.

I’ll have to really give some serious thought to whether or not I want to go forward with trying to make this whole set-up work. But if anyone has had experience with the rail cap issue, talk me into it.

Aaron

[juanbanzai]

I don't want to hijack my own thread so let me address the CF possibilities. If I decide to repair the d8b, I'd like to do the CF mod to the d8b's power supply unit as well as that seems to be the best solution for trying to solve any issues with failing IDE drives and the excessive noise they bring to any studio. While I'm doing that, I should probably look into calming down the power supply fan and the CPU fan as well. So thanks, y-my-r, for sending that link. One piece of kit we have here at the studio are SATA drives. HUNDREDS of them. If I can find one that's low in size, I can give one of those a try.

I'm also going to try and scrounge up some optical i/o cables just to see if it's something ridiculous like connecting to the d8b that's preventing the HDR from booting... even though I had it boot on its own with a failing hard drive a few weeks back.

Oddly enough, I find myself going back to the motherboard in the HDR as a possible culprit. When the HDS posts, it counts off the internal memory then detects the primary and secondary master drives. The "verifying DMI pool data" text pops up and says "success." There's a quick check to see if a floppy is installed. If not, I can hear the internal drive spin up and the welcome screen appears. After a second or two, the sync card lights up, then the optical cards in the card cage light up. After all THAT happens, the unit stops doing anything else. My point to bringing this up... if this sequence is taking place, and up to this point everything points to a successful boot-up, does this mean that everything on the motherboard is working as it should or could the failed boot-up be caused by some failed component on the board? I only bring THIS up because when I started this whole thing I was under the impression the motherboard was bad.

The other thing I'm really trying to get my head around is the constant failure when I try to do a clean OS from floppies. I downloaded two different builds of the HDR install files from the forum database site. Both will not go any further than bringing up some text and seeking the 1st floppy before everything stops. Could there be a setting in the tools.ini file, or in some other file on the 1st floppy, that's not reading my system correctly? Is there any chance the floppy drive itself is messed up??

Mike, I really appreciate your offer to send a drive. I really don't want you going to all that trouble. I'm going to try and locate another drive today... so would it be possible for you to create an image of that drive and put it some place where I could download it?

Finally... the rail cap issue... the guys here want to take a crack and replacing those caps. But here's the funny thing; before I went to bed last night, I went into my studio and turned the d8b on. I heard a CLICK and the system booted right up! No thumping from the speakers, no bouncing VU meters, and no continuous clicking of some of the faders trying to reset themselves. IS the rail cap issue an intermittent thing, or am I looking at something else?

Oh.... did I mention that I really don't like "digital" audio consoles?

Aaron

[doktor1360]

I don't want to hijack my own thread so let me address the CF possibilities. If I decide to repair the d8b, I'd like to do the CF mod to the d8b's power supply unit as well as that seems to be the best solution for trying to solve any issues with failing IDE drives and the excessive noise they bring to any studio. While I'm doing that, I should probably look into calming down the power supply fan and the CPU fan as well. So thanks, y-my-r, for sending that link. One piece of kit we have here at the studio are SATA drives. HUNDREDS of them. If I can find one that's low in size, I can give one of those a try.

Hey Aaron... personally, I wouldn't lose any sleep over 'hijacking' any thread(s), it's not malicious in it's intent - no harm, no foul man. I seriously doubt anyone viewing this is gonna get butthurt either. But back to the show...

I haven't read thru this entire thread, but I'd personally distance myself from any mechanical hard disk with the HDR or D8B pronto. They're old and mercurial at best, and that's IF you can even find a proper one... which means, most likely it'll be more expensive than any compact flash card or solid state disk (SSD SATA II). They're just more reliable, and their duty cycle dwarfs any hard disk. If you have upgraded firmware supporting larger disk capacity, that's even better yet. I'll use my own architecture as an example... I've upgraded two HDR's in this manner (one for an acquaintance).

I use a compact flash card back plane bracket adapter for the boot media (C:\ logically if you're a Windoze user). Inexpensive and easy as hell to install, it also allows easy access to the card media for removal if necessary/required. Inserted into that is a 32GB compact flash card that has the Mackie operating system installed on it. I also installed a floppy disk emulator, and tossed the boat anchor 3 1/2 floppy drive onto the scrap pile... they're as useless as tits on a nun. It's not a question of 'if' it'll fail, only 'when'. The emulator is USB and works flawlessly as intended, but it can be a bear to install into an HDR if a person is uncomfortable taking a computer apart - which clearly you aren't based on reading what I have of this thread (LOL). I also use removable SSD's in the external drive chain, the physical housing and adapter(s) have all been upgraded accordingly. This is even a little more difficult to install, but if it's done while doing the floppy emulator it becomes a bit less arduous...

All this is contained in a BOM (bill of material) I compiled, it might even be listed somewhere here on the forums. Y-my-R can help ya out here too, we got his HDR upgraded recently so he can also contribute as he has successfully performed these same upgrades as well.

I'm also going to try and scrounge up some optical i/o cables just to see if it's something ridiculous like connecting to the d8b that's preventing the HDR from booting... even though I had it boot on its own with a failing hard drive a few weeks back.

In reality, it's just adding another troubleshooting variable to the situation. The HDR should successfully boot to it's interface, it can run (idle) as a 'stand-alone' piece of gear as it were. That would at least ensure the unit is ready to play happily with any other hardware that may be involved, the D8B inclusive.

Oddly enough, I find myself going back to the motherboard in the HDR as a possible culprit. When the HDS posts, it counts off the internal memory then detects the primary and secondary master drives. The "verifying DMI pool data" text pops up and says "success." There's a quick check to see if a floppy is installed. If not, I can hear the internal drive spin up and the welcome screen appears. After a second or two, the sync card lights up, then the optical cards in the card cage light up. After all THAT happens, the unit stops doing anything else. My point to bringing this up... if this sequence is taking place, and up to this point everything points to a successful boot-up, does this mean that everything on the motherboard is working as it should or could the failed boot-up be caused by some failed component on the board? I only bring THIS up because when I started this whole thing I was under the impression the motherboard was bad.

It sounds good to a point, for me the confusing part is where you describe the sync & optical cards 'lighting up'. I have optical cards in my HDR too, so during this same procedure what is displayed on the vga output AND the fluorescent display on the face of the HDR? What exactly does 'stops doing anything else' mean, is the unit locked up (frozen)? This would be really good triage information...

The other thing I'm really trying to get my head around is the constant failure when I try to do a clean OS from floppies. I downloaded two different builds of the HDR install files from the forum database site. Both will not go any further than bringing up some text and seeking the 1st floppy before everything stops. Could there be a setting in the tools.ini file, or in some other file on the 1st floppy, that's not reading my system correctly? Is there any chance the floppy drive itself is messed up??

Yes, it's more than likely that floppy drive has gone tits-up. It's ancient tech, finding one that actually works is becoming rarer day by day. An emulator is an option long term if you ever need a brute force install or (gulp) want to sell your gear and ensure an easy transition for the next user. Just a personal opinion of course...

Regarding the tools.ini file - it's a text file in reality. An yeah, it certainly could be a show stopper on an install. Just ensure the contents are a duplicate of a known good file - exact copy inclusive of all punctuation... no extra spaces and that sort of thing in any of the key/value pairs. If the file's not using the proper internal format, the os installation interpreter reading that text file will NOT be happy at all...

Mike, I really appreciate your offer to send a drive. I really don't want you going to all that trouble. I'm going to try and locate another drive today... so would it be possible for you to create an image of that drive and put it some place where I could download it?

If this isn't available here anywhere, just let me know. I could image my cf card and provide a .ISO image (or other appropriate extension) that you could burn to media with any disk utility.

Finally... the rail cap issue... the guys here want to take a crack and replacing those caps. But here's the funny thing; before I went to bed last night, I went into my studio and turned the D8B on. I heard a CLICK and the system booted right up! No thumping from the speakers, no bouncing VU meters, and no continuous clicking of some of the faders trying to reset themselves. IS the rail cap issue an intermittent thing, or am I looking at something else?

Mercurial gear... old tech/electronics so anything is possible. These forums are full with tales of audio peril of all manner... (LOL)

Seriously, over the years I've personally experience all kinds of strange (and at times uncomfortable) issues. Anymore when 'trouble' does happen to arise, I find that disconnecting anything involved from the ac supply (wall or whatever) and walk away for 5-10 minutes. This allows for all non-volatile onboard capacitors & memory the time to drain. The rail caps are protection related, and it's electronics 101. Every TTL component (ic) on the pc boards have a cap that holds a small 5V charge while connected to an external power source (120VAC). This doesn't even account for any other voltage 'rails' (shared dc supply voltage circuits) that may or may not be involved (12, 16, 48VDC respectively). I once recall when I booted my D8B... it locked up and I was presented with the 'Broadway Lights' display... everything, and I mean everything, was lit up the console. It was beautiful in a macabre sense... never-the-less scared the sh*t outta me initially. I unplugged everything, walked away and got a cuppa coffee. Came back about 5-10 minutes later, reconnected things and hit the 'on' button. Everything came up normally as it would be expected...

Oh.... did I mention that I really don't like "digital" audio consoles?

You'll love the D8B once you have one up n running... the options available, routing and the workflow amongst other things are like a heroine addiction...

Advance apologies for wasting anyone's bandwidth due to this 'windy' response. If any of this proves to be erroneous, I stand fully corrected.

Which leads to the following, but you knew it was coming anyway so here it is:
[Standard Mgmt Disclaimer] - "Your actual mileage may vary"

[Y-my-R]

I agree with everything the Dok said, here.

As mentioned, I haven't had the rail cap failure issue, but I had PLENTY of funny issues when booting the D8B, that required me to restart it before I could use it. Sometimes a few times.

I think for the D8B and HDR, a certain level of occasional troubleshooting and maintenance will need to be expected. They're not the most reliable pieces of equipment, but when they work, they're great!

I have 3 D8Bs, and it took a while to settle on the "best combination" of components I have. Since then, my D8B has been running pretty stable, and I NEVER had to restart it due to problems during an active session, with the hardware combination I have in use now.
I do, however, sometimes have to try booting a second time. In my case, I get small amounts of level showing on two of the channels, that shouldn't be there. When I restart, it's usually gone.
In some rare cases, I have a few channels having the meters stuck in the red after bootup. Turning it off and on again, usually takes care of it.

With other d8B hardware combinations (Console/rack and components in the rack) in the past, I did also have a situation where EVERYTHING would light up on the console... or at other times, I also had flashing/pulsing meters on start. But that always went away when I reseated the BFC connector, and/or just let the console sit for a little bit.

In other words... even if you don't end up having bad rail caps, a certain level of patience is required with this kind of gear.

But at least for me, once it's all fully booted, it's exactly what I want and I can't imagine going back to a mixer-less setup (...and personally, I would only consider high-end analog mixers to record through at this point. My analog Mackie 8-Bus has been sitting in it's flight-case for years and I probably won't ever bring that back out... unless I play in a band again and we need a beater mixer for the rehearsal room, or something. I'm not using the Pres and converters on the D8B... well, except for some of the aux sends and Alt returns), so the sound quality I get out of it, is mainly dependent on my audio interface converters (I'm mostly recording through the converters of a UA Apollo, but typically go through a Aurora Audio "Neve style" pre). Since the signal stays digital through the D8B, aside from the software quality, there's no signal degradation. So, IMO, this is far superior to a setup with a medium level mixer, like a soundcraft or something.

Besides, most REALLY good sounding vintage analog mixers need TONS of maintenance and create an even higher electricity bill than the D8B (especially with the extra AC you'll need to cool the room back down from all the heat generated by the power supplies etc.).

IMO, the HDR is similarly temperamental, and I had all the lights on the front panel light up at the same time a few times, too... and the MDR I had in the rehearsal room some years back, ALWAYS stopped working when I needed it (but it had spinning drives in it).

Long story short:
The D8B and HDR are so old and temperamental, in my opinion, that you will need a ready-to-go backup unit for both, if you're running them in a commercial studio setting, where every 20 minutes count.

If you intend to run them in your home studio, then I think it's important to first decide if a D8B/HDR setup may be overkill. The pres and converters are not going to be better than more modern audio interfaces... so, IMO, the D8B/HDR only start making sense when you're dealing with larger projects. Either recording a lot of channels at the same time, or at least needing to mix a lot of channels (or using the D8B as a sort of routing central for your outboard gear, etc.).

You don't give me that impression and seem pretty knowledgeable... but I often times get the impression that some of the people on here, just got a free D8B somehow, and want to connect the two analog outputs of their Focusrite Scarlett to it, or something... and with that kind of perspective of usage, it just doesn't make any sense to add a D8B to the mix, if the scope is this minimal to begin with.

Don't get me wrong, though - I LOVE the D8B and the flexibility and options it gives me in my home studio. But I used to run recording and mixing sessions the old school way back in the days and am comfortable with that type of workflow and the options it gives.
IMO, it just really depends on the scope of the projects your planning to work on. If you typically only record one thing at a time (e.g. vocals OR guitars OR...) and get your stuff mixed by someone else, then I'd think you don't need a D8B/HDR.

So, IMO, it totally depends on what you intend to do with this, and if you can deal with possibly needing an extra 10 minutes for a second round, when first turning your studio gear on. But if that is being considered, the D8B can make for an awesome central point to a studio.

[juanbanzai]

Thanks to both of you for hanging with me on these issues.

I just want to be clear that the d8b is not my only mixer. Like I said earlier, the powers-that-be wanted to toss it because they felt the MDR and HDR would operate as stand-alone units. Originally, it was assumed that there were only 4 removeable drives that were ever saved from the days when the d8b was radio production's primary board. However, it turns out there are 10-12 drives with productions on them that several folks want removed and archived. This is the primary reason why I'm trying to get everything working to "some degree" of dependability.

Previously, I relied on other Mackie, Behringer or Soundcraft boards in my home studio since they were a necessity to route signals to my outboard effect and processing units. But now with DAWs like ProTools and Cakewalk in my arsenal, having a large mixing console of any kind seems like overkill. I just need to have a board with faders under my hands. Software is great, but when it comes to doing an actual mix, I need to move things. Although, I mixed an opera I recorded back in October and I did the entire thing in Cakewalk after doing a TON of programming and automation. It was pretty cool to just press "play" and sit back and watch the magic.

Of course, I watched some YouTube videos on the d8b and saw what it's capable of doing. That got me really excited to put it to use in my home studio... even if I don't really need it. From what little use I've had with the board, I do like it. People at work know to NEVER throw anything away without checking with me first. I just couldn't stand the fact it was on its way to the dumpster.

After talking with some friends at work today, I've decided to give the rail capacitor replacement a try if it's absolutely necessary. On Dok's advice I purchased two 32gb CF drives and the necessary IDE adapters which will hopefully arrive on Friday. If anything, doing that modification will eliminate the flakey drives and cut the noise a bit.

Dok, can I please ask if you're able to check the tools.ini file or any other set-up file that may be on disk 1 of a floppy install set and let me know what you have in those files? I downloaded my copies of the install disks from the forum; 1.3 and 1.4... and I have no choice but to assume they're fine and SHOULD work. But like you said, since BOTH of the disks fail on trying to install the OS, I'm going with you that the floppy drive may be toast. This in itself is weird because I was told the HDR saw very little use. It was the MDR that was worked to death at the station.

Y-my-r... are you saying that due to their age, regardless of the working features or possible good sound output, the d8b will never be reliable in this day and age? Now if this were an old stereo receiver, I'd recap the entire thing (especially if the unit was made in the 70s) simply for the fact that age IS going to deteriorate some components. If I were working on an antique radio, I wouldn't even plug it in with doing a full recap and checking all the resistors for tolerance. With that said, is there a "checklist" so to speak of things that absolutely MUST be done to a d8b in order to MAKE it reliable and keep it running for many years. Outside of the rail cap thing, are there any other areas within the d8b that need to be looked at because they may be potential time-bombs?

[juanbanzai]

Well guys, I don't know what to say other than "when all else fails, the "unlikely" is more often than not, the "likely" cause of a problem." Which brings me back to my first post in this thread; swapping out the motherboard in the HDR.

The fact that only the BIOS would see the drives in this unit, but all would get stuck when booting up the actual HDR OS, made me take another look at the motherboard as being the problem. It was too much of a coincidence that ALL the IDE drives were acting wonky. I removed the motherboard from my MDR and installed it into the HDR. After setting the BIOS and restarting, BANG! The HDR booted up in seconds!!

Now I'm glad I ordered the CF so I can modify the HDR and d8b. The fact that this piece of gear is now working gave me cause to stay with the d8b and fix whatever is bothering it. In fact, I ordered the SMD rail caps and will do the replacement.

Thanks for really sticking with me on this one. I hope this experience helps out anyone else who's trying to bring some of this old Mackie gear back from the dumpster.

Aaron

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