After having a bad day yesterday resurrecting an Indigo, I thought I'd ask you all if you've got any hardware-related "oops" moments to share. I'll kick it off with my own story:
Several months ago, I was able to score a reasonably-priced Indigo R4K off of eBay. It was nearly local and had skins in almost perfect condition. (Missing a latch on the drive door, but otherwise very nice for its age.) But it didn't boot due to the typical TOD clock battery problem. I finally got around to replacing the battery this weekend. (Largely because I'd been waiting to amass enough of a shopping list to make it worthwhile to order supplies from DigiKey. I wasn't going to pay $8 shipping just to get a $6 battery!) De-soldering the old one and soldering in the new battery wasn't too big a deal. Put the motherboard back in, hooked up the serial cable, flipped the power switch. Saw a green light and nothing else. No boot tune. No output in minicom.
Now I'm not exactly skilled at soldering so my first thought was that I had killed the motherboard with too much heat, damaged another nearby component, or otherwise made things worse with my amateurish use of the soldering iron. A quick search led to this thread and in particular the last post there where SAQ suggests cleaning & re-seating the PM1 CPU module. That's when I realized that the PM1 was still sitting on my desk, unconnected to anything.
Oops!
My enthusiam to test my soldering job had apparently gotten the best of me, and I'd missed the rather important step of re-attaching the CPU.
Funny how computers don't work so well without CPUs.
After fixing that oversight, it boots up to the PROM menu just fine, I can run hinv, etc. All is good.
So, now that I've told my story do any of you have similar tales of silly mistakes you've made while repairing hardware? Something that caused you to initially panic thinking you'd made things worse when in reality it was just a minor problem or skipped step that had a happy ending after all. If you can stop laughing at me long enough to post your stories, I'd sure like to know I'm not alone!
Several months ago, I was able to score a reasonably-priced Indigo R4K off of eBay. It was nearly local and had skins in almost perfect condition. (Missing a latch on the drive door, but otherwise very nice for its age.) But it didn't boot due to the typical TOD clock battery problem. I finally got around to replacing the battery this weekend. (Largely because I'd been waiting to amass enough of a shopping list to make it worthwhile to order supplies from DigiKey. I wasn't going to pay $8 shipping just to get a $6 battery!) De-soldering the old one and soldering in the new battery wasn't too big a deal. Put the motherboard back in, hooked up the serial cable, flipped the power switch. Saw a green light and nothing else. No boot tune. No output in minicom.
Now I'm not exactly skilled at soldering so my first thought was that I had killed the motherboard with too much heat, damaged another nearby component, or otherwise made things worse with my amateurish use of the soldering iron. A quick search led to this thread and in particular the last post there where SAQ suggests cleaning & re-seating the PM1 CPU module. That's when I realized that the PM1 was still sitting on my desk, unconnected to anything.
![Embarassed :oops:](../../../static/13e932e8-f4c9-4ef7-b201-c8610bb86771.gif)
![Embarassed :oops:](../../../static/13e932e8-f4c9-4ef7-b201-c8610bb86771.gif)
My enthusiam to test my soldering job had apparently gotten the best of me, and I'd missed the rather important step of re-attaching the CPU.
![Exclamation :!:](../../../static/8309eee1-8cac-42fb-b106-6e54860fc746.gif)
![Laughing :lol:](../../../static/e3f252e5-1494-4194-84cb-114b675b1e4b.gif)
So, now that I've told my story do any of you have similar tales of silly mistakes you've made while repairing hardware? Something that caused you to initially panic thinking you'd made things worse when in reality it was just a minor problem or skipped step that had a happy ending after all. If you can stop laughing at me long enough to post your stories, I'd sure like to know I'm not alone!