emusonacid! legacy

Hi guys,

I haven't visited this site for a very long time, as my Emu has been going quite smoothly for a few years...
Tonight, whilst using my E6400 Ultra, I heard some crackling noises, and looked over at my Emu, and the MIDI light was lit solid, and nothing else was happening. I couldn't navigate through any menus or anything. So, I powered her down, waited a while, then powered it up. It loaded ok, then after about half an hour, she crashed again. Now, when I try to boot her up, it goes through the initial checksum screen, says "System found in Flash", then goes to the next screen, with the Emu logo on the left... but the splash doesn't happen, just sits on the 3 horizontal stripes for the start of the logo... been trying for 5 hours now, and no joy. I opened her up, re-seated all the cables, took out the ram's and flash, and put them back in... no luck... this has actually happened to me before, a few years ago, but it just stopped happening... any ideas? i'm yet to re-load the EOS, as I don't have any floppies right now, and it's 11pm in Australia...

Any help would be greatly appreciated! i have a gig using this sampler on the 3rd november, supporting Big Bud, so really, REALLY need this sampler fully functional...

Specs: E6400 Ultra
128mb RAM
'WAS' running EOS 4.61
Normally have a SCSI ZIP250 and 18GB external SCSI HDD, but have disconnected everything in attempts to fix it.

My guess would be a bad power supply

hi art. thanks for your reply... but, what would lead you to that conclusion? the unit powers up OK...

The crackling noise may be a leaking/bad capacitor. The fact that powering it down for a while fixed it would support this. Mind you, I'm not speaking from personal experience with my e6400 Ultra.

It also sounds a lot like bad system RAM. Find an 8MB or 16MB 72-pin 60ns or less EDO SIMM module and replace the system RAM (it's in the slot right above the Flash ROM holding the operating system, on the right side of the motherboard) and see if she works fine with the new RAM. If she still crashes, it's something else, but at least you will have ruled out the system RAM.

Also, you should remove and reseat all memory modules and cables, sometimes connections oxidize and become intermittent over time, which would cause erratic behavior.