[darkhelmet02]

I recently got a Sun 411 Caddy CD drive, but it does not power on. The power supply works fine, but upon further inspection, I found that the surface mount capacitors had leaked all over the board. I replaced them all to no avail, powering the device up only makes the CD spindle spin for only a moment and nothing else happens. Does anyone have any advice on what to try next? Or has anyone encountered these drives flat out not working?

[mamorim01]

Is there any control on the board or is it just a power supply board? I have been unable to find any picture detailing the innards of this drive enclosure. If the later, have you measured voltage on the different rails to confirm it is indeed working properly?

It might also be a problem with the CD drive itself. I understand this was an issue with certain Toshiba models, I myself had to replace two XM-5701B from an Ultra 1 and an Sparcstation which were either not showing up on the OBP bus probes or simply not becoming ready and spitting out all types of errors in Solaris.

See, for instance (not my thread).


http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.ph...ing-CD-ROM

PS. Also check for proper jumper positions to terminate chain if necessary, sector sizes, etc.

[darkhelmet02]

I will definitely try to play with termination and jumpers, I did not think about changing them, but the power supply was tested to be fine, so luckily no problems there. The problem is, nothing happens when the drive gets powered on. The spindle spins for only a moment, and nothing else happens. The read/write led does not illuminate, the laser does not try to seek, it just sits there. I suspect something on the board itself has just died, but I would much rather troubleshoot further than to completely replace the drive.

Is there any control on the board or is it just a power supply board? I have been unable to find any picture detailing the innards of this drive enclosure. If the later, have you measured voltage on the different rails to confirm it is indeed working properly?

It might also be a problem with the CD drive itself. I understand this was an issue with certain Toshiba models, I myself had to replace two XM-5701B from an Ultra 1 and an Sparcstation which were either not showing up on the OBP bus probes or simply not becoming ready and spitting out all types of errors in Solaris.

See, for instance (not my thread).


http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.ph...ing-CD-ROM

PS. Also check for proper jumper positions to terminate chain if necessary, sector sizes, etc.

[mamorim01]

I will definitely try to play with termination and jumpers, I did not think about changing them, but the power supply was tested to be fine, so luckily no problems there. The problem is, nothing happens when the drive gets powered on. The spindle spins for only a moment, and nothing else happens. The read/write led does not illuminate, the laser does not try to seek, it just sits there. I suspect something on the board itself has just died, but I would much rather troubleshoot further than to completely replace the drive.

If the drive has got a 50 pin data connector then it is probably fed power through a four pin molex type connector, you can measure voltage on both the 12V and 5V rails from those pins. This would be the first thing to check, but I see you are already confident on the power supply.

My feeling is that the drive itself may be faulty, I would remove the drive from the caddy and test it on an internal scsi bus on a different computer next. These things do tend to go bad with time, you know. There are quite a few references of CD drives used by Sun in these old Ultras and Sparcstations (mostly Toshibas) behaving in a similar way to what you describe (ie, simply sitting idle and not showing up on bus probes or becoming ready). I have run into this type of issues before.

It is always worth to check termination, drive IDs, etc before ruling out possibilities. If you could confirm the drive model and maybe even post a picture showing the position of the jumpers it could be easier to troubleshoot it.