[rescue] SunCD Repair

[Eddie Cottongim]

A few updates and remarks which might be helpful to others given recent 
discussion.

On the CD:

No obvious problems with capacitors. Its hard to test them in circuit. 
These are the surface mount, short metal can version which are difficult 
(for me) to replace.
Good idea on the insufficient spindle friction. I tried making it a 
little more sticky, but no luck.
It actually attempts to spin up three times before it stops.

On using a DVD with SparcStation 10:

I ordered a SCSI DVD, an HP A5220-67003. On the SS10, it seems to be 
able to boot CDs and at least access DVDs (but possibly not boot - I 
didn't have a known-good one to try) DVDs. Other note:

NetBSD installed and seemed to work. From the CD, its pretty bare bones, 
but perhaps a good starting point.

Debian Etch at first appeared to have trouble mounting the CD, but this 
turned out to be due to running with 32 megs of RAM. With more RAM (160 
meg), it installed with no problems. It takes a lot of disk space, and I 
had to go with no desktop to get it on a 1 gig drive. Once running, it 
printed an esp driver message for every hard disk access - no relation 
to the DVD, but it got very tiring, so I moved on. I think that can be 
fixed. I may come back to this later.

Various Solarii would boot, but fail in the installer with disc access 
related messages either when starting OpenWindows or suninstall. My best 
guess is a compatibility issue with the drive. On an installed system, I 
would play with the scsi_options, but it would seem to require building 
a new install CD. Haven't tried yet.

Hope this helps someone.
Eddie


 


Steve Sandau wrote:
>>> Are there any service manuals, repair ideas etc available for the Sony
>> CDU-8012? I've got one that responds to probe-scsi, but "test cdrom" 
>> gives
>> back a "-1" failure (not much help), and is dead otherwise. It spins 
>> the CD
>> briefly, then stops. No obvious internal problems after partial 
>> disassembly.
>>
>> The "obvious problem" with all these drives is failed electrolytics. 
>> One of
>> the ones that's come across my bench also had a dusty optical path. 
>> Chances
>> are good your drive is eminently repairable.
>
> The other problem I used to run across was the spindle not having 
> enough friction to spin the cdrom fast enough. ISTR the symptom as 
> spin, not get up to speed and stop trying. Cleaning the "gripping" 
> surface on the spindle was sometimes enough to get some use out of it.
>
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>



-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.