[weblacky]

Hello there,

After several PM's with Weblacky, I decided to ship to him my Fuel's motherboard for temperature sensors replacement. For other interested people from Canada (GTA) to Weblacky place the UPS price is not so bad, only 60 CAD. I don't know yet how much I will pay for customs.

Looking forward to have my Fuel working again...

Blacksmith.

Hi Blacksmith,
your UPS package was received today. I will open it and inspect the board and begin repair procedures tomorrow.

Repair procedures have been completed, microscope visual inspection has been completed, and multimeter check for direct shorts and connection to test pads has been completed. I'm drafting an Email to send to blacksmith, shortly.

DM sent to Blacksmith to start continuation of transaction.

Blacksmith's board had a broken drive bay Fan header, it was replaced with a donor header from a PC server board.  I have photos of the board posted here: 

https://siliconimage.irixnet.org/index.p...Blacksmith

I didn't apparently take pictures with all the chips off, I was in a hurry so these don't show any blank spots waiting for new chips, just old and new.

This is a first generation Fuel board, which I've never seen in person. Nor have I ever seen pictures of one. This may be the first posted series of images of a first generation Fuel board on the Internet today given how much has been taken down now. Why is it important? Because there's two very different changes in the first board versus all the subsequent boards. 

1. There are tiny extra connectors in the front of every PCI-X slot on this board. These connectors look like they're supposed to provide some form of extra power or extra featureset that SGI maybe was planning to have fuel-only adapter boards but I guess canceled that. I've never seen this connector on any card and the stencil and pads for these connectors are in the later Fuel mainboard revisions but the connectors were left off. Check those out!

2. The L1 and PROM chips are in fact labeled. Now these may not be the end all and be all of all firmware chips on the board but they are in fact labeled with human readable text. On later boards there's simply a series of numbers and versions with no English description at all. This is important because we are eventually going to need to replace corrupted boards that have either suffered bit rot or have suffered flashing problems. These labels at least give us a partial view of what goes where. This information was obscured in later boards. Why?  Who knows...


I'm now taking steps to pack this back up and do the necessary work to get the international shipping arranged.

I've gotten all the UPS information and pre-paid for a label. I sent both a PM and email to blacksmith detailing shipping information for his approval in case there is a discrepancy. A PayPal invoice for the job has been sent to blacksmith's contact email.

Package is fully packed and ready to be handed over to UPS on Monday, unless any discrepancies are discovered we are a go for shipment.

Payment Received!  Package will be mailed out Monday! I will send tracking once mailed (though it's on the paperwork I've given to Blacksmith anyway).