@@bengelman2600 Only after they circled in the fault be careful, tedious elimination. That's what most people l see looking for faults on the Internet lack. They jump into ideas they got somewhere (usually bad caps as he said .. there is only one case where you can be relatively sure about those, and that are wax/tar-sealed paper foil types from
@@VintageTechFan Everyone wants it to be the "quick fix". Everyone wants to say "it's bad caps!" as if that's even the most common failure for these kinds of functional issues. A good knowledge of the schematic for a particular board, plus basic tool skills, plus a lot of invested time, can give you meaningful results beyond concluding it's one of the "easy fixes".
As you were saying “make your bet ” I was thinking “guesses suck, I hope they stick a scope on it”. Never give up and measure stuff, a great way to solve the problem. Great work.
@@TubeTimeUS: Hair "all over the place"? Have you seen my beard? I think there was even loose hairs on that salvage planar I sent - certainly they have been on the other planars I've taken photos of!
I have an IBM Model 70 PS/2. This thing is a nightmare to work with and I can definitely put myself into your shoes. I would never recommend these things to retro enthusiasts, unless you like unusual hard- and software configurations.
Which can vary by PS/2 level - a desire to run the microchannel P/390 board that was shown is definitely both an "unusual hard- and software configuration". What is the submodel of your 8570? There are adjustments that can be made to reduce the "nightmare".
Aww, but fixing them is half the fun! But you're right, I certainly wouldn't recommend them as a retro-gaming machine. Space hardware can be a bit hard to come by sometimes, never mind finding sound cards for them.
It is actually running fine 🙂 after a lot of fiddling. 80386 at 20mhz (FCC ID: ANO9SA8570-D) / Kingston KTM 16000|386 memory expansion / XGA Adapter 69F9704 / a replacement Sound Card from (who guessed it) TubeTimeUs, because the originals are unaffordable, + his floppy adapter for a Gotek Floppy drive 😅. Btw. most of the problems I had, were (not kidding) capacitor related. Especially the original floppy drive was a nightmare. Just the harddrive (whopping 120MB and pretty rare as well) is giving me some headaches. Because what do I do when it reaches its end of life. No MCA slot is free anymore for a SCSI Controller and the ESDI drives are way too obsolete to find replacements for!! 😢 Hopefully someone is working on an adapter for this issue too. ESDI 2 SD TubeTime !! I count on you 🤗
Usually tantalums from that period have a low failure rate anyway, most of the bad ones that I have seen are from the early to mid 80s. If a tantalum goes bad... you'll know it. About 80% of the time I have run into that issue it's because one of the little suckers exploded.
Success! A great diagnostic process to find something that is so hidden. I'm thinking that an issue of a couple of "Bermuda" planars not holding their configuration may be similar - are you (and Eric) ready to check a sample that shows that fault?
This is what I would be eager to see! I have two 77 Planars that have this issue. it's an annoying failure preventing a complete system startup. Hello Dave by the way!!
@@joelmarcott3282: "Santa" seems to be my new nickname, although I hope people aren't expecting me to bring them something. Only one of my "Bermuda" planars is affected, although I know now to start pulling out my USB microscope and voltmeter. We will get this solved!
I confess I didn't even know that vias could do that. Embarrassed to admit that. Definitely learned something today. Thanks for a very interesting series of videos. Very nice to see it repaired and working. I suspect you are way happier than I am. Great that you have such a talented friend who was willing to spend so much time getting it going again. Kudos Eric.
Not all caps go bad with age. I've got some electrolytic caps that are 40 years old and show very low ESR readings and good capacitance, still. It depends on the quality, ambient temperature, and electrical stress.
Capacitor failures have been the bane of electronics repair techs since they were invented. For sure, there are caps that have lasted better than others. But ask anyone who repairs vintage electronics (tube gear) and they will not waste time trying to reform old electrolytic or paper caps. Are there still some that work? Sure. Are they reliable? Not likely. Of course an IBM PS/2 is not a 1931 Radiola... I would not jump to shotgun replace all the caps on a motherboard. But I wouldn't be surprised when a tantalum or two popped either.
It really depends. I have never seen a bad ceramic cap, but I have seen shorted tantalums, foil caps with drastically decreased capacitance and a fair few old electrolytics that vented a few seconds after the device being turned on. I guess the application of the cap as well as the quality is the key here.
I fix Philips video recorders from 1975-1980 on my channel. Virtually never had a bad capacitor on those. A few bad ICs though. JVC DVD recorders and Panasonic professional studio recorders from the early 2000s, now they suffer bad capacitors all day.
@@senorcapitandiogenes2068 Ceramic caps can fail, but it's usually from the board flexing or something being dropped on them causing them to crack and short out.
I have seen such a machine in the past and people who were busy with these machines told me that they weren’t documented, that’s why I remembered! Strange!
You are very funny Marc, but the best joke you ever told is that there are commenters who would tell YOU GUYS that it was a bad cap. I guess it's a board level repair. The one you try right after "did you turn it off and back on again?" and you can do it if you only have a soldering iron. Brains optional. I guess anyone can type. Thank you for sharing your brilliance with us all and keep an eye on those caps!
my dad told me a story where a circuit didn't work but worked with the oscilliscope probe attached. turns out it just needed that extra little capacitance of the probe
Schrodinger via, as soon as you probe it affect the state - lol -. Reminds me of my leaking plastic petrol tank. When you pumped it up to 0.5psi it would weep, but you couldn't see the exact point of the leak. So you raise the pressure to 1psi expecting it to leak faster, but instead it presses the crack shut and stops the leak. Took a few days to work that one out - lol -.
Intermittent faults like this are pain and time consuming to find. Well done in tracking it down. It's easy to speculate and/or over complicate the issue but 90% of the time for intermittent faults at least, connections are the cause. The capacitor changers would have come up short here.
This brings back a lot of old bad memories! ;) The PS2 line has to be the homeliest computer of the era, and MCA could drive you nuts. I ported some SYSV and Vax code to Warp. It was a lot of "new wheel building", and I think I started smoking cigarettes in 1988 ;)
I remember when I got my first DX2-40, I could upgrade my graphics cards ram with 16 pin dip packages to incredible 512K .. that machine was solely running final frontier first encounters (and doom sometimes) though I think I had win 3.11, but that gobbled up too much space on my 20 MB shoe box sized hard drive, dos and nc were sufficient ;) It's incredible how small all that became, that processing power and storage might now look like a spec of dirt under your fingernail :D
It wasn't that long ago, maybe a couple of years ago, that I discovered a hole in the wall bank teller machine was still using OS2 warp! Fascinating video! Marc, thanks!
In a former life I worked quite a bit with ICL. Walking through one of their facilities I noticed some ATMs being commissioned were booting *Microsoft* OS/2
Eric fits in your team. Same approach finding errors. Good to know that there are still people out that look for the real root of a problem. Thanks for sharing ! And you should look for a 1.2GB SCSI drive. Preferably a power-saving IBM DCAS3120. The system has a "natural limit" on the size because it was supposed to hold a "convenience partition" (with the content of the reference and diagnostic disk) for immediate access when required. The limit is 3.94GB and most modern SCSI drives are either larger or don't have the "narrow" 50-pin connector any more. It is possible to use 68-pin F/W drives with a converter plug - but the primary / boot / ID6 drive may not exceed 3.94GB. Once booted an additional drive can be larger. I had machines with 60MB (MegaByte) capacity as boot drives and 68-to-50 converted 18GB Ultrawide SCSI drives as second. The small boot drive is just used for the reference partition, but everything else was on the bigger drive.
I had some old full height 5.25" SCSI drives years ago. 9GB capacity, 50-pin connector, and bloody noisy beasts! The server tower they came in, I've repurposed as my main i7 rig, but sadly, those drives failed and went for recycling years ago.
@@BlackEpyon From my "times with PS/2" I must have dozens of DORS, DCAS, DGHS and suchlike in stock. Along with some Seagate Elite Full Height drives. Wonder, how many of them would come up after years of being not used. There are 2 DCAS and 10 DGHS (or DDRS) in the one Server 520 alone ...
This happened to me with a Sinclair Spectrum. When I put my finger on the certain pins of the ULA, the board worked, and stayed working until next power off/on cycle. Same with a cold sprey too, as long as I kept it very cold, it worked. My initial thought was a bad solder joint, so I reworked all of them, no result. Then I tried pulling the certain pins up or down with a 10K, produced intermittent results. Lastly I tried capacitive coupling on those pins with a 10n and that killed the ULA for good. Replacing the ULA (took 3 months to get one) fixed the board for good. So, my final diagnosis on it was that the original ULA was very tired and only working marginally with a magic finger on it.
Dielectric constant of air strikes again! Congratulations on fixing it as those are often the hardest problems to find. In my experience, broken vias are a lot more common than a broken trace on an inner plane. Whenever I found one there ware often more in the same area of the board so soldering a wire through all the vias in that area might be a good idea to avoid future problems.
Well done team, congratulations. Eric your blood is worth bottling mate. Marc good on you for persisting to the end. Hopefully there will be many more needles in haystacks to come.
I think my early guess was a break in the multi layer board and that I would have just frisbeed the board sadly but lifes too short and customers have no desire to pay me for my time. If one via has broken chances of another breaking over time with temprature expansion and contraction is possible. Well done finding the fault.
All evidence pointed to a break in the circuits somewhere. I'm glad Marc & team found it. A break in the via plating itself is a weird one, to say the least. Cheers,
lool we had an flatpanel xray detector returned that was frying power supplies left&right... opened it up and found a scorch mark on interior of back cover from an SMD tantalum that blew its ass out in short-circuit..just as you say!! desoldered it (there was an identical next to it so prolly redundant anyway for ESR or some nerd thing) and recalibrated the unit and was fine. the powersupplies were all fine, too: used calipers on a dead fuse and found compatible ones on digikey to pop into the SMD fuseholder. it was like $60k of equipment fixed locally with a hot air SMD station and a couple dollars on digikey LOL. i kept that SMD tantalum for years
Yeah, electrolyitics usually just ooze out over time as they go open circuit. Tantalums are usually pretty reliable, but when they go, they go spectacularly. With electrolytics, if they aren't leaking, you'd need to connect an ESR meter or something to discover that they're leaking. With tantalums, there's no doubt, you just look for the scorch mark!
The system function is inversely proportional to the length of Eric’s haircut. An inverted Samson’s hair, if you will. We shall see what happens as it grows…. No idea what will happen if Eric changes his t-shirt.
Wow an NEC Multisync! I had one back in the day. Sadly a complete POS that never worked properly. It did however cure me from paying top dollar for a name brand ever again.
Tough find. Kudos on your repairs, gentlemen. Had to deal with this sort of issue on an 8 ch. mixer. Took what seemed like an eternity to find that kind of failure. Board was tweaked/twisted just enough to crack a via.
This growing of tin whiskers is especially a problem in a vacuum. I was told that it is more pronounced on lead-free solder and that ESA, therefore, insists on a minimum percentage of lead in all soldering for space applications.
@@BlackEpyon I completely agree. Besides that, I think that in a hobby environment the toxicity isn't much of an issue. With a bit of ventilation and washing you hands afterwards everything should be fine. If you're soldering 40 hours a week then it's different story of course.
Apparently it was a common failure mode in early transistors, too -- inside the can. If I remember correctly, you charge up a capacitor and zap across the junctions to fix it... or something like that. :)
@@ydonl My old physics teacher used to repair his broken light bulbs like that. Cap across the connector and wiggle the filament around until it welds itself. I always thought this was more for the challenge than for cost savings...
I really enjoyed your explanation of the various options in the poll. What a remarkable result to have achieved. What kind of foolishness is a 43Hz refresh rate?! Jeepers, what a strange default.
I think the cap thing is because of how many electronics people see online fixed, by replacing the caps. If you're not an electronics engineer by trade, or someone who understands the building blocks, and you've fixed or seen others fix things by replacing the caps... it's easy to see all the problems as cap problems. Caps can be a problem, and by far the easiest way to trace, but they're just a morsel of the whole meal. Gotta eat the whole thing to make an educated guess.
Not sure if you have considered it, maybe replace the hdd with an SCSI to SD or some other flash device. A simple google search shows that they are available on ebay $95.00 thou.
Mad props for solving this. But really - you should've gone with the easy common-sense alternatives of either: 1) Reaching into the future STNG universe with some handy vintage HP time-space-reality manipulation machine so you could borrow some Nanites (along with the Lt. Cmdr. Data to act as interpreter) and just as them to repair any defects they found. Or... 2) Calling in Yoda to sense the disturbance in the force so he could tell you where the problem was. I personally like the simple elegance of solution 1, but given your luck you'd probably find an obscure intermittent fault with the time machine that you'd have to fix first. And I suppose there's always the dual risk of the usual "time loop paradox plot" problem, and the chance that some Nanites might escape into the wild here in the 21st century and ruin our economy by repairing all our "obsolete" devices. As for solution #2: Because of his centuries of experience, I expect Yoda would've given you the answer sooner, but you got the same result by letting Eric do his thing. It seems the Force is strong with that one!
I haven't seen the problem jet, but I'm guessing it's a bad solder joint or a broken solder joint. Edit: It's a via, so I was wrong, dum dum. Congratulations, that was a really hard issue!
My favourite way pf proving a bad connection was to use a scope in differential mode on the source & destination ends of the trace which shows up really well. Mind you, that was way back when using DIP with 0.1" pin spacing so a lot easier!
There is absolutely NO WAY to diagnose this in retrospect. You guys put a lot of time into this repair. Respect!
Seriously brute force
@@bengelman2600 Only after they circled in the fault be careful, tedious elimination. That's what most people l see looking for faults on the Internet lack. They jump into ideas they got somewhere (usually bad caps as he said .. there is only one case where you can be relatively sure about those, and that are wax/tar-sealed paper foil types from
@@VintageTechFan Everyone wants it to be the "quick fix". Everyone wants to say "it's bad caps!" as if that's even the most common failure for these kinds of functional issues. A good knowledge of the schematic for a particular board, plus basic tool skills, plus a lot of invested time, can give you meaningful results beyond concluding it's one of the "easy fixes".
As you were saying “make your bet ” I was thinking “guesses suck, I hope they stick a scope on it”. Never give up and measure stuff, a great way to solve the problem. Great work.
Well put. That is indeed the proper way to do it.
Careful comparison of this episode with the flashbacks reveals the truth:
The key to the repair was Eric getting a haircut.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one that noticed that...
haha my hair has been all over the place in this series
@@TubeTimeUS: Hair "all over the place"? Have you seen my beard? I think there was even loose hairs on that salvage planar I sent - certainly they have been on the other planars I've taken photos of!
It allows superior airflow to cool the brain thus making it able to work faster as for all processor
Tin whiskers, I tell ya!
I have an IBM Model 70 PS/2. This thing is a nightmare to work with and I can definitely put myself into your shoes. I would never recommend these things to retro enthusiasts, unless you like unusual hard- and software configurations.
Which can vary by PS/2 level - a desire to run the microchannel P/390 board that was shown is definitely both an "unusual hard- and software configuration". What is the submodel of your 8570? There are adjustments that can be made to reduce the "nightmare".
Aww, but fixing them is half the fun! But you're right, I certainly wouldn't recommend them as a retro-gaming machine. Space hardware can be a bit hard to come by sometimes, never mind finding sound cards for them.
It is actually running fine 🙂 after a lot of fiddling. 80386 at 20mhz (FCC ID: ANO9SA8570-D) / Kingston KTM 16000|386 memory expansion / XGA Adapter 69F9704 / a replacement Sound Card from (who guessed it) TubeTimeUs, because the originals are unaffordable, + his floppy adapter for a Gotek Floppy drive 😅.
Btw. most of the problems I had, were (not kidding) capacitor related. Especially the original floppy drive was a nightmare.
Just the harddrive (whopping 120MB and pretty rare as well) is giving me some headaches. Because what do I do when it reaches its end of life. No MCA slot is free anymore for a SCSI Controller and the ESDI drives are way too obsolete to find replacements for!! 😢
Hopefully someone is working on an adapter for this issue too.
ESDI 2 SD
TubeTime !! I count on you 🤗
Well it's taken three months, five episodes and a lot of hard work and dedication, but we finaly got Eric a decent haircut! well done everyone. :-)
Too bad about Amazon. I remember them from back in the day. So sad, I had high hopes for them. Oh well. ;)
Usually tantalums from that period have a low failure rate anyway, most of the bad ones that I have seen are from the early to mid 80s. If a tantalum goes bad... you'll know it. About 80% of the time I have run into that issue it's because one of the little suckers exploded.
tantalums throw tantrums to terrify timid technicians
Yeah, a bad tantalum usually let's you know in dramatic fashion.
every amd motherboard from the 90's...
Success! A great diagnostic process to find something that is so hidden. I'm thinking that an issue of a couple of "Bermuda" planars not holding their configuration may be similar - are you (and Eric) ready to check a sample that shows that fault?
This is what I would be eager to see! I have two 77 Planars that have this issue. it's an annoying failure preventing a complete system startup. Hello Dave by the way!!
@@joelmarcott3282: "Santa" seems to be my new nickname, although I hope people aren't expecting me to bring them something. Only one of my "Bermuda" planars is affected, although I know now to start pulling out my USB microscope and voltmeter. We will get this solved!
just write a custom bios 😉
@@TubeTimeUS It may not be that simple. Could be a bad connection or faulty Dallas Clock.
@@joelmarcott3282 if it is the Dallas clock chip Necroware has a replacement for that
I confess I didn't even know that vias could do that. Embarrassed to admit that. Definitely learned something today. Thanks for a very interesting series of videos. Very nice to see it repaired and working. I suspect you are way happier than I am. Great that you have such a talented friend who was willing to spend so much time getting it going again. Kudos Eric.
Not all caps go bad with age. I've got some electrolytic caps that are 40 years old and show very low ESR readings and good capacitance, still. It depends on the quality, ambient temperature, and electrical stress.
I want to swap out all modern caps with quality old ones. Have more faith in them.
Capacitor failures have been the bane of electronics repair techs since they were invented. For sure, there are caps that have lasted better than others. But ask anyone who repairs vintage electronics (tube gear) and they will not waste time trying to reform old electrolytic or paper caps. Are there still some that work? Sure. Are they reliable? Not likely. Of course an IBM PS/2 is not a 1931 Radiola... I would not jump to shotgun replace all the caps on a motherboard. But I wouldn't be surprised when a tantalum or two popped either.
It really depends. I have never seen a bad ceramic cap, but I have seen shorted tantalums, foil caps with drastically decreased capacitance and a fair few old electrolytics that vented a few seconds after the device being turned on. I guess the application of the cap as well as the quality is the key here.
I fix Philips video recorders from 1975-1980 on my channel. Virtually never had a bad capacitor on those. A few bad ICs though. JVC DVD recorders and Panasonic professional studio recorders from the early 2000s, now they suffer bad capacitors all day.
@@senorcapitandiogenes2068 Ceramic caps can fail, but it's usually from the board flexing or something being dropped on them causing them to crack and short out.
It is immensely satisfying to me that you guys have fixed this board. +1
"No one will ever find a broken via..."
CM and friends: "..."
I have seen such a machine in the past and people who were busy with these machines told me that they weren’t documented, that’s why I remembered! Strange!
Well done everybody involved to get the PS/2 working.
You are very funny Marc, but the best joke you ever told is that there are commenters who would tell YOU GUYS that it was a bad cap. I guess it's a board level repair. The one you try right after "did you turn it off and back on again?" and you can do it if you only have a soldering iron. Brains optional. I guess anyone can type. Thank you for sharing your brilliance with us all and keep an eye on those caps!
my dad told me a story where a circuit didn't work but worked with the oscilliscope probe attached. turns out it just needed that extra little capacitance of the probe
Schrodinger via, as soon as you probe it affect the state - lol -.
Reminds me of my leaking plastic petrol tank. When you pumped it up to 0.5psi it would weep, but you couldn't see the exact point of the leak. So you raise the pressure to 1psi expecting it to leak faster, but instead it presses the crack shut and stops the leak. Took a few days to work that one out - lol -.
This mechanism would explain a (different) fault I'm experiencing right now. Thank you, kind stranger on the internet! :)
Really cool to see the bad via up close. Great job. EDIT: That NEC Monitor is sweet.
@CuriousMarc the playlist for this series has part 1/2 swapped. Made for a confusing catch-up experience until I realised!
Finding a bad via is inversely proportional to the time it takes to repair it. Been there. Congratulations!!
Intermittent faults like this are pain and time consuming to find. Well done in tracking it down. It's easy to speculate and/or over complicate the issue but 90% of the time for intermittent faults at least, connections are the cause. The capacitor changers would have come up short here.
OS2 Warp. That brings back memories.
NEC Multisync! I had a 19" version. Beautiful monitor.
This brings back a lot of old bad memories! ;) The PS2 line has to be the homeliest computer of the era, and MCA could drive you nuts. I ported some SYSV and Vax code to Warp. It was a lot of "new wheel building", and I think I started smoking cigarettes in 1988 ;)
I remember when I got my first DX2-40, I could upgrade my graphics cards ram with 16 pin dip packages to incredible 512K .. that machine was solely running final frontier first encounters (and doom sometimes) though I think I had win 3.11, but that gobbled up too much space on my 20 MB shoe box sized hard drive, dos and nc were sufficient ;)
It's incredible how small all that became, that processing power and storage might now look like a spec of dirt under your fingernail :D
It wasn't that long ago, maybe a couple of years ago, that I discovered a hole in the wall bank teller machine was still using OS2 warp! Fascinating video! Marc, thanks!
In a former life I worked quite a bit with ICL. Walking through one of their facilities I noticed some ATMs being commissioned were booting *Microsoft* OS/2
Eric fits in your team. Same approach finding errors. Good to know that there are still people out that look for the real root of a problem. Thanks for sharing !
And you should look for a 1.2GB SCSI drive. Preferably a power-saving IBM DCAS3120. The system has a "natural limit" on the size because it was supposed to hold a "convenience partition" (with the content of the reference and diagnostic disk) for immediate access when required. The limit is 3.94GB and most modern SCSI drives are either larger or don't have the "narrow" 50-pin connector any more. It is possible to use 68-pin F/W drives with a converter plug - but the primary / boot / ID6 drive may not exceed 3.94GB. Once booted an additional drive can be larger. I had machines with 60MB (MegaByte) capacity as boot drives and 68-to-50 converted 18GB Ultrawide SCSI drives as second. The small boot drive is just used for the reference partition, but everything else was on the bigger drive.
I had some old full height 5.25" SCSI drives years ago. 9GB capacity, 50-pin connector, and bloody noisy beasts! The server tower they came in, I've repurposed as my main i7 rig, but sadly, those drives failed and went for recycling years ago.
@@BlackEpyon From my "times with PS/2" I must have dozens of DORS, DCAS, DGHS and suchlike in stock. Along with some Seagate Elite Full Height drives. Wonder, how many of them would come up after years of being not used. There are 2 DCAS and 10 DGHS (or DDRS) in the one Server 520 alone ...
That was a tedious troubleshooting. Well done.
And isn't the via next to the cracked one also looking suspicious?
This happened to me with a Sinclair Spectrum. When I put my finger on the certain pins of the ULA, the board worked, and stayed working until next power off/on cycle. Same with a cold sprey too, as long as I kept it very cold, it worked. My initial thought was a bad solder joint, so I reworked all of them, no result. Then I tried pulling the certain pins up or down with a 10K, produced intermittent results. Lastly I tried capacitive coupling on those pins with a 10n and that killed the ULA for good. Replacing the ULA (took 3 months to get one) fixed the board for good. So, my final diagnosis on it was that the original ULA was very tired and only working marginally with a magic finger on it.
Dielectric constant of air strikes again! Congratulations on fixing it as those are often the hardest problems to find. In my experience, broken vias are a lot more common than a broken trace on an inner plane. Whenever I found one there ware often more in the same area of the board so soldering a wire through all the vias in that area might be a good idea to avoid future problems.
I am convinced “voodoo magic” was a valid IBM SKU.
I had that exact same monitor in the mid-90s, i kept it with my 400mhz k6/2, gave it to someone, wish i still had it now...
Nice work. Glad it wasn't some really nasty inner board via.
Well done team, congratulations. Eric your blood is worth bottling mate. Marc good on you for persisting to the end. Hopefully there will be many more needles in haystacks to come.
Congratulations and well done! I am very impressed!
THANK YOU FOR THE UPLOAD MARC!!!
I think my early guess was a break in the multi layer board and that I would have just frisbeed the board sadly but lifes too short and customers have no desire to pay me for my time.
If one via has broken chances of another breaking over time with temprature expansion and contraction is possible.
Well done finding the fault.
A great series - thank all.
All evidence pointed to a break in the circuits somewhere. I'm glad Marc & team found it. A break in the via plating itself is a weird one, to say the least.
Cheers,
I recall hearing the PDP 10 at MIT had a odd switch with two settings " Magic " and " More Magic. " I have no further details.. God bless you all.
I don't think Jeff is likely to abandon Amazon any time soon, haha. That is one funny PS/2 you'v got there :D. Well done finding that via!
IBM PS/2, featuring the cast from M.A.S.H!
I remember installing OS/2 Warp 3 from diskettes... more than 30 of them back in the day. Man it was NOT fun
Especially after about 20 disk changes into the install and discover bad sectors/read error. lol
Gratuitously proprietary hardware is the pits.
lool we had an flatpanel xray detector returned that was frying power supplies left&right... opened it up and found a scorch mark on interior of back cover from an SMD tantalum that blew its ass out in short-circuit..just as you say!! desoldered it (there was an identical next to it so prolly redundant anyway for ESR or some nerd thing) and recalibrated the unit and was fine. the powersupplies were all fine, too: used calipers on a dead fuse and found compatible ones on digikey to pop into the SMD fuseholder. it was like $60k of equipment fixed locally with a hot air SMD station and a couple dollars on digikey LOL. i kept that SMD tantalum for years
Yeah, electrolyitics usually just ooze out over time as they go open circuit. Tantalums are usually pretty reliable, but when they go, they go spectacularly. With electrolytics, if they aren't leaking, you'd need to connect an ESR meter or something to discover that they're leaking. With tantalums, there's no doubt, you just look for the scorch mark!
Thanks guys. Fun to see and also a learning experience.
Is it strange that when an upload doesn't have the IBM intro song and voiceover I feel slightly disappointed?? :)
The system function is inversely proportional to the length of Eric’s haircut. An inverted Samson’s hair, if you will. We shall see what happens as it grows…. No idea what will happen if Eric changes his t-shirt.
Love to see the hard ones! Those are the fun ones to learn tricks from.
Wow an NEC Multisync!
I had one back in the day. Sadly a complete POS that never worked properly.
It did however cure me from paying top dollar for a name brand ever again.
Tough find. Kudos on your repairs, gentlemen. Had to deal with this sort of issue on an 8 ch. mixer. Took what seemed like an eternity to find that kind of failure. Board was tweaked/twisted just enough to crack a via.
This growing of tin whiskers is especially a problem in a vacuum. I was told that it is more pronounced on lead-free solder and that ESA, therefore, insists on a minimum percentage of lead in all soldering for space applications.
I prefer 60/40 lead solder anyways. Toxicity aside, it simply works better, and is easier to work with, than complete tin.
@@BlackEpyon I completely agree. Besides that, I think that in a hobby environment the toxicity isn't much of an issue. With a bit of ventilation and washing you hands afterwards everything should be fine. If you're soldering 40 hours a week then it's different story of course.
Apparently it was a common failure mode in early transistors, too -- inside the can. If I remember correctly, you charge up a capacitor and zap across the junctions to fix it... or something like that. :)
@@ydonl My old physics teacher used to repair his broken light bulbs like that. Cap across the connector and wiggle the filament around until it welds itself. I always thought this was more for the challenge than for cost savings...
@@TheOddVideoChannel Pretty crazy! Yes, I would say... for the fun of it!
Great job !!!
Ugh, you have brought back bad memories of far too many OS/2 installs.
Very impressive videos! Thank you all
Funny how at 13:47 the web business and shopping application spelt QANTAS as Quantas.
I wonder if proximity to a nuclear test might be the culprit? Or perhaps damage from a nearby stellar supernova?
wow you fixed it ;) ive watched from the start to the end
I really enjoyed your explanation of the various options in the poll. What a remarkable result to have achieved.
What kind of foolishness is a 43Hz refresh rate?! Jeepers, what a strange default.
I think the cap thing is because of how many electronics people see online fixed, by replacing the caps. If you're not an electronics engineer by trade, or someone who understands the building blocks, and you've fixed or seen others fix things by replacing the caps... it's easy to see all the problems as cap problems.
Caps can be a problem, and by far the easiest way to trace, but they're just a morsel of the whole meal. Gotta eat the whole thing to make an educated guess.
It's a secret style called "Shaolin Buddha Finger" :-)
Wow! Great job!
Absolutely outstanding content
push the ram a little to the side, bad contact of loose pins to ram conection
Great episode. P.s. got my dsky mousepad. Love it.
Respect the via.
Amazing upload, beautifully created this video, stay healthy and safe, have a nice weekend, lk
Not sure if you have considered it, maybe replace the hdd with an SCSI to SD or some other flash device. A simple google search shows that they are available on ebay $95.00 thou.
of all the things that could go wrong, vis a via.
that was a great repair! Veni, vidi, vici!
Mad props for solving this.
But really - you should've gone with the easy common-sense alternatives of either:
1) Reaching into the future STNG universe with some handy vintage HP
time-space-reality manipulation machine so you could borrow some Nanites
(along with the Lt. Cmdr. Data to act as interpreter) and just as them to repair any
defects they found.
Or...
2) Calling in Yoda to sense the disturbance in the force so he could tell you where the problem was.
I personally like the simple elegance of solution 1, but given your luck you'd probably find an obscure intermittent fault with the time machine that you'd have to fix first. And I suppose there's always the dual risk of the usual "time loop paradox plot" problem, and the chance that some Nanites might escape into the wild here in the 21st century and ruin our economy by repairing all our "obsolete" devices.
As for solution #2: Because of his centuries of experience, I expect Yoda would've given you the answer sooner, but you got the same result by letting Eric do his thing. It seems the Force is strong with that one!
Cool video, keep it up, thank you :)
People just vote bad cap to toll Marc! haha
GG Eric!
Part 6: Getting Netscape Navigator
Isn't a bad via that failed by itself a sign of a manufacturing defect in the PCB? Isn't it a matter of time until another via fails?
Probably.
Did I see JAVA for OS/2?
You are royal my friend ❤️
so does that mean the original chip is still good? because if so it can be used to fix another pc still.
Yes it’s still good, and we used it in another motherboard.
Wonderful!!
I'd absolutely have bet on "cracked via"
Super!
What would hours * the cost of all your labor amount to?
Does it matter? It's the challenge that is important. Otherwise he would just buy something new
We paid Eric nothing, but we promised to double his salary next time!
Ohh but it was worth it for that message! If only. Sorry Bozos, ground control is on strike, you have been abandoned.
That's not the right CD-drive, the right one has a slanted front and takes caddies, not unprotected discs.
00:33 M.A.S.H. !
👆👆👆 thank you for recovering my files. Great job sir…👆👆👆
Wow
neat
Quantas..
Yay, Amazon is gone!
Vias of Hell!
wOww tubetime!!
How about AIX?
You were lucky that wasn't a blind via.
UND WHY MEINHERR ...It IS VERRUCT !!!!!!!!!!
Last!
And, predictably, you get a free bad vintage via on your next board.
You should have gotten a dog to sniff the board. Dogs sniff on cracks all the time, a dog would have found the cracked via in no time at all!!1! ^^)
I haven't seen the problem jet, but I'm guessing it's a bad solder joint or a broken solder joint.
Edit: It's a via, so I was wrong, dum dum.
Congratulations, that was a really hard issue!
Eric the true PS/2 MVP. Just wow. Congrats guys.
Ah, the repair is typically the easy part. Finding the fault however? That's when you've got to enlist some help. Great series!
unless the fault was a bad power supply then the repair was equally tricky, but that's another story
It's always simple - once you find the problem. But finding the problem can drive you bonkers.
My favourite way pf proving a bad connection was to use a scope in differential mode on the source & destination ends of the trace which shows up really well. Mind you, that was way back when using DIP with 0.1" pin spacing so a lot easier!
That's really clever! Going to have to try doing it that way
I'll steal that. But you do have to suspect signal integrity as the cause before you get there too lol.