[Labguy]

Hey guys, been looking around the board the last couple days and after finding some answers to problems i hit a big snag.

I work for an educational institution, we recently had an Arrow 750 donated, it has a Siemens Acramatic 2100, with a Vickers controller. The machine was working fine, it was powered down over the recent holiday, and when it was powered back up we had an error.

We called in a local machine tool shop guy and he deemed the battery on the mother board dead. Sure enough when the voltage was checked it was well below battery voltage.

After changing battery the machine runs threw its boot setup, detects the hard drive, and attempts to boot. upon booting things happen in this order.

Screen goes black and message "Ntdetect..." with dots appearing on the screen
Message appears below saying a problem is detected and to press space bar to revert to a previous setup, weather space bar is pressed or not pressed systems continues
Screen turns blue with white text and appears of loading windows NT
Screen changes to a screwed up black and white screen, a pixelated hourglass appears in the center of the screen and the screen freezes.

I would post pictures but I am getting this second hand.

I am being told windows NT has been corrupted and the hard drive needs to be replaced. I am told this cost $$$. Anybody know a possible lower cost solution rather than getting a new pre-loaded hard drive? Or perhaps has run into this problem before and might be able to suggest a different solution.

Thanks

[Al_The_Man]

It does sound very much like the HD, Siemens charge a big $$ for a new one for some reason?
This is why many make an exact clone (not copy) of a working one.
Al.

[Labguy]

AL, Thanks for the quick reply. I do not have a working drive to clone from.I have several older IDE style hard drives would it be possible to load one of those with a clean version of windows NT, snag the control software from the bad hard drive and get it going.

I have also seen several references to Linux CNC, would it be possible to load an hard drive with that (if i could figure out how this was done) and run it with the open source software?

Any further further help from anybody would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[mike_Kilroy]

dont jump at new hd and its cost!!!!

there are 2 batteries on 2 different boards in that a2100, and if someone replaces the one that handles bios stuff (like it sounds ur guy did) they loose the bios settings and have this issue!!! PLSE search the forum here and find the 2 wizards on here who routinely help solve this issue after it happens like this. or call mag themselves. dont spend money on new operating system or HD until you find for sure what is going on as from your description you have 99% probability you need new bios settings typed in and 99% probability NO hardware problems!

[Labguy]

Thanks Mike for the response. Can you tell me who exactly am i looking for, or whom I am calling? I don't have authorization to spend money on this project, We are going to try and resurrect the hard drive tomorrow by plugging it into a desktop and seeing if we can get it too boot, among other things. The cost I have been told is around 1000$ for a new pre-loaded HD, that is robbery considering you can buy blank IDE HDs for pennies these days. So I will keep looking around here for help.

I guess this is a general call out for anybody who can help me out with the bios settings for an Arrow 750, I will post mother board number and revision tomorrow, as well as pictures of the start up sequence.

To reiterate

Arrow 750 with Siemens Ac 2100, was working fine, powered for down 1 week. Upon start up. Gave error, deemed the battery on the mother board in the computer was dead. After removal of battery voltage on battery was less than .5 volts out of 3 volts. Replaced battery. After replacement had a couple more errors during boot, resolved, mostly thanks to this site. Now computer comes on, finds hard-disk, finds floppy, finds keyboard, asks weather to boot or to enter setup (F1 or esc, respectively). Press esc, screen goes black, white letters show up "ntdetect..." with dots appearing below as if tracking progress. Error message appears below, saying a problem encountered, press space-bar to boot from last known good settings/version. Weather you press space bar or not, screen turns blue, with white letters appearing to boot windows NT, words appear, file extensions, and dots track across under the main heading. Screen blanks for second, when reappears shows black and white vertical bars across screen, very junky with lots of pixels, then very pixelated hour glass appears in center of screen and screen freezes.

if it does turn out to be the hard drive, I have been doing some research on Linux CNC, would this be a viable alternative to the $$$ to Siemens for a new drive? This machine is used to produce shop parts, as a demo, and for hardware trouble shooting practice. Not used for any specific programming teaching. I have done a bit of research and saw that many people have loaded Linux CNC to Arrow 500's. If you could point me toward any useful information beyond the LinuxCNC homepage I would appreciate it.

Let me know if you guys have any more information. Any one who helps I owe you a beer, or non-alcoholic beverage of your choice.:cheers:


Thanks again

[John_B]

Dont hook that HD up to a PC or youll screw the pooch. When a regular windows OS starts looking at the drive it screws up something, I think I was told it was the boot sector... can't remember exactly.

Anyway, if you want to clone the drive get an old copy of ghost and boot a PC to the floppy with ghost on it. There are several threads about this topic.

Rgds,
JohnB

Sent from my DROID RAZR

[mike_Kilroy]

lost my reply. try again -s hort version as out of time now...

u have 2 batts; ws board and other board; u need to know which u replaced before you talk to the knowledgable folks! maver1ck, mallardfiz, or mag service themselves. it sounds like ur tech lost ur bios settings as happens every time one of those 2 batts is replaced incorrectly.

[maver1ck]

What John B is referring to is newer versions of Windows will overwrite the file system by "upgrading" your hard drive to NTFS, but the A2100 won't work with this file system.

The batteries Kilroy refers to are on the WS board (which you likely changed) and the RT board. If your battery was dead on the WS board, you lost the settings in the BIOS and they will need to be reset (if you have not already done this). Since your WS battery was dead, your RT battery is likely also low or dead, so should be checked, but unlike the WS BIOS, you can't just change these settings in the machine, so don't pull the battery out to test it because this will cause you to lose the settings.

Regarding your Hard drive. I have had some success in cloning hard drives after they fail, so if you want to send your drive to me, I can take a look at it. Even if you purchase a new hard drive for your machine, you will still need the settings specific to your machine, so unless you have a recent backup of these somewhere, you will want to try to get them from the hard drive before it gets any worse.

If you want to contact me, please send me a PM (private message).

[Labguy]

Hey guys,

The hard drive is no good, a member of our it department was able to pull the files off the drive. I spoke with MAG they want 1500-2000$ for a new drive and have a lead time of 2-3 weeks. This is not likely to happen. I have the recovered files off the old hard drive. Is there anyway, that anybody know of to make a new hard drive. So far i am up a creek. Or if somebody has or knows of a tutorial to load an open source control software, i would try most anything now. I can PM pictures of relevant serial numbers if anybody needs them to help.

Thanks