Sega HOTD4 on Lindbergh Yellow Won't Reinstall? And Ideas ?

[NightWolfx03]

I have a House of the Dead 4 with a Lindbergh Yellow, the hard drive died and it stopped booting. I was trying to reinstall the machine with the restore DVD on a new drive and all I get is the "Now Loading" screen, the bar gets stuck close to the N of the Now Loading and just sits. If I leave the machine on the screen eventually goes black. Any ideas ? I have tried 2 different blank hard drives so far and a different USB DVD drive and so far it doesn't seem like it's trying to do anything.

The machine's JVS board starts with an orange LED and then starts blinking green, the I/O board that is connected to the JVS board has 3 red LEDs, 2 that are on solid and one that is flashing rapidly. This occurs whether I have a drive plugged in or not, with / without the DVD inserted.

Thanks in advance for any help. And if this is the wrong forum for this post let me know and I'll move it or I would suspect a MOD would move it.

[lilshawn]

long shot in the dark... boot into the BIOS and check the date and time. sometimes software will freak-out if the current date is before the date of files written to the drive... which can happen if the BIOS battery is dead and the date get set to 01-01-99 or something.

[NightWolfx03]

Found out how to get into the Bios and set the time and date, it still seems to just hang on that now loading screen still. Going to do some more reading or see if anyone else has an ideas for it.

[NightWolfx03]

So I have made some progress. After talking with Sega a bit I moved my CF Card, Blank Hard Drive, Key Chip, and Video card to another Lindbergh Yellow that I have. I was able to use an external DVD drive and install the game and it reboots / boots up normally. So I took that hardware, moved it back to the original motherboard / power supply / JVS / Sound card and tried booting it and it got stuck at the same spot on the "Now Loading" screen.

So I got a bit curious and plugged a keyboard in, since I noticed that the screen would go blank like clockwork about 20 - 30 minutes after being powered up and sitting and it made me wonder ( also with the fact that you can see GRUB pop up when the game starts loading). The first thing I found is that if I hit any keys on the keyboard that it would bring the "Now Loading" screen back, so then I hit escape and I got a bunch of text which is probably whatever OS they are running going through it's startup. I was able to hold down shift and page up / page down through all the messages and I found a bunch that seem to relate to the IDE bus

They read:

Code: [Select]

read_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
read_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
request: I/O error, dev 03:40 (hdb), sector 4
[code]read_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
read_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
[code]read_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
read_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
[code]read_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
read_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
[code]read_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
read_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
unexpected interrupt, status=0xd0, count=12
reset: success
Then is has what look to be a bunch of normal messages and it halts.  If I hit Ctrl-C it spews out a few more pages of these errors and then the white Lindbergh loading screen with the bouncing text shows up, the game loads and is playable.

If I reboot the machine however, it just gets stuck at the "Now Loading" screen again and hangs until I interact with the keyboard.

So today I am going to try and move the power supply over from Let's Go Jungle and see what happens, the next step would be to go into the bios, disable the primary IDE channel and try to connect both the CF card and the hard drive to the secondary channel via a CF adapter. I have already tried a different IDE cable for the hard drive and I think it throws the errors with just the CF card too. Starting to wonder if I have a failing motherboard.

[lilshawn]

maybe go into the bios and load the defaults...save... go back in and load the optimized defaults. and see if it boots then. it's free, can't hurt.

might also be a bad or overheating northbridge. i have a computer I've had to install PCI-e SATA card in because the hard drive kept dropping out and losing connection, despite new cables and whatnot. I even threw out a solid state drive one time cause it thought it went bad. bypasing the onboard controller with a card solved it.

[NightWolfx03]

Not to poke an old post but I think I need to put this in here.

So I ended up doing 2 things. I tested all the boards from the machine in another unit (let's go jungle cabinet), as well as moving the key over to to that unit and was able to re-install the game on a blank used IDE drive. What I ended up finding out through a process of elimination was that the problem may have and appears to have been my power supply. I ended up replacing the PSU in the computer with a new ATX supply that was modular, and I re-pinned the power connectors for the things outside of the unit to fit the supply. ( I will post pictures when I can find them again )

After this I was able to again successfully re-install the game and it's been working mostly problem free since. Though as of the last month I have an issue where is crashes and I want to check out my video card / hard drive again. However the problem where it was not wanting to run the install disk ended up being that the power supply was being flakey.

Since I installed the new power supply the picture on my monitor got a bit more clear and less wobbly, so I suspect the old supply was introducing noise somewhere that I could not measure on my meter.

I was able to find some of the information and a bit more troubleshooting help from Ken that runs irepairsega.com so I think he deserves a shoutout as well.