First off, I want to say I was very aware of all the risks associated with everything I did.

So I got one of Patricks last memory boards, and set about installing it. Got everything good, checked hijack & the boot logs, 64MB. I was happy. During a semi-long drive, I started getting much more segfault/segkill errors than I had ever seen before. So I took the mainboard back out, and double checked everything. I touched some stuff up and put it back in. Life was good again.

Then I started getting even more errors, with the screen doing some really funky things. I had realized I didn't get all the test pads under the board cleaned up properly after I first installed it, and figured that had caused a problem. Tonight when I pulled it apart I found that it had pulled up on the VCC3 side. I decided I needed to try to get under the board cleaned up, or I would be continually plagued by problems. So I began the process of removal. Lets just say all the warnings are there for a reason. I pulled up just about every test pad. But, the VCC3 test pad had already pulled up. This was the problem. So I slowly examined the PCB and found 4 pads I needed to repair. I put some small splice wires on, checked continuity, and powered it up. I got tons of sigkill's when the player was trying to rebuild the database. Plugged in the serial, and realized it was all due to my old reservecache of 180. I plugged in an old drive and it booted right up! Yay! No errors were being reported, so I got lucky that I was able to repair the traces on the bottom of the pcb. I don't have a macro capable camera, but I will borrow one during the day, and try to post some photos of the pcb now.

So now to put my drive back in I need to remove the reservecache setting. So is there any way to get the config.ini off the player, when I cannot get to the developer prompt? I do not have a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter unfortunately. Will I have to rebuild the disk in order to get rid of the reservecache? Any ideas?

Put it in as a slave drive and use the new drive to boot?

Matthew

Thanks guys for the help! I got everything running great again. Still haven't been able to get my hands on a macro capable camera, but when I do I'll post pictures of the damage. Now I just need to decide if I want to hold on to the memory board, or sell it. It is still in perfect shape. But my empeg will never be able to take one again.

Those laptop drive to desktop drive adapters are very cheap - I got mine for about $5 USD. I'm glad I got it and have used it several times.

Not true.
You still should be able to do the stacked memory method. But I think that one is a lot more work than memory board, and I've done both.

Well, here's a picture of the damage. My repairs aren't the best looking, but my empeg is running great right now. There is still plenty of clearance, but I did put some electrical tape along the bottom of the empeg's case just in case (although I'm sure it will never short). As you can see I will never be able to reinstall my memory board. But yeah, I can still stack. Stacking I would probably only go for 32 MB. That huge stack to get 64 is intimidating.

Congratulations on getting it back up and running!

Technically, no disk controller at all... the disk is just mapped into IO space. The SA1100 wasn't so hot at fast cycles to external devices, the SA1110 added a couple of options that changed the cycle patterns - this made disk access on the Rio Central quite a bit quicker (6MB/sec, ISTR?).

Hugo

You can turn off the memory in 16MB banks using the dip switches on the memory board, so can have 16,32,48, or the full 64. Or 0MB, but that's less useful. Removal of the board shuldn't be necessary.

pca