I'm in a bit of a pickle here. One of my machines is a '97 Arrow 500 running an A2100 controller. No issues to speak of other than mechanical ( new spindle a while back and tool changer probs) but the controller has been very reliable.
After a long weekend ( a trade show last week), the operator brought the machine up normally and encountered a load stop on the black screen just after it initializes/recognizes the hard drive...the screen basically says that it is unable to boot and that we should boot from the NT software to debugg.
Problem...no floppy...no software...no way. So I pulled the drive and checked it ( and backed it up) and I have no issue accessing the data on the drive. It seems the drive itself is fine at this point so I let windows ( probably a mistake) try to find the winnt boot error and fix it while hooked up to the desktop computer. I put the drive back in and now it get through the black screens, starts into the blue screens and then locks up with another "incaopable of booting" error and a screen full of ...krnl files and it recommends starting debug at startup.
I'm lost. I have replaced the harddrive years ago in this machine with an exact clone that came with it but the reason was that it would not even recognize the other drive at all ( although I can "see" it too with a cable to the desktop) and now of course I have all the settings/parameters just right for the machine and would like to avouid a "start from scratch".
Any sage advice? I could sure use some. Had several important prototypes lined up for this machine this week and my other 5 are running production. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
(some other questions too...is anyone selling loaded drives for them, seems like I saw some on eBay once...also, what about software to reload onto the disks...any sources?)
Kentusi