Hello,
I just brought home a late serial numbered HP 9836C in mint condition. It
looks fine, shows almost no signs of use (and absolutely no signs of abuse),
but it seems to have a startup problem. When I power it up, it goes through
its POST and in the list of found hardware are the lines:
.
.
.
Flexible Disc
Flexible Disc Failed
.
.
.
After the POST, but before the 9836C looks for an OS to load, it emits a
series of high and low pitched beeps (low, low, high, low, high, high, low).
After that, it is able to load an OS (HP BASIC) and run fine, with the
exception that the left-hand floppy drive is inaccessible.
I've taken a known good floppy drive, floppy controller, and even the CPU
card from a 9826A (I swapped the PROM on the CPU cards to convince the test
CPU that it was a 9836C), but the error is identical in every case. It also
makes no difference if there are cards in the card cage or not, if a hard
drive is attached to the HP-IB interface or not, or if there are formatted
floppy discs in the drives or not.
I found a 9836C on eBay, and strangely enough it shows the same problem at
startup as mine:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2303481339
What's going on here? What is the meaning of the beep pattern? Is there a
fix?
Thanks in advance,
Stan
Received on Fri Jan 24 2003 - 00:50:01 GMT