I think my hard drive failed

[dieseldogpi]

On my dedicated Golden Tee Fore cabinet.  I just got everything working, played it some with my pops when he stopped by and then turned it off.  When I went to show my wife the final product, the hard drive was making really wierd noises, like a whining noise, and the game wouldn't recognize it.  What the hell happened?  Do I need a new hard drive?  If I do, how do I get the old crap off of the broken one to put on the new one?  Thanks.

[Kevin Mullins]

Check the power supply going to the drive first.

[dieseldogpi]

what should be going to the hard drive?  I mean it's definitely getting power of some sort, cause I hear it spinning and then whining like crazy.

[Kevin Mullins]

12v DC ..... same as any other PC harddrive.

Just seen weak power supplies cause weird issues, so I tend to check that first off.

[mvsfan]

a weak power supply will definately cause odd things to a cabinet.

i hadnt played my cabinet for a while and turned it on one time and all i got was garbage on the screen, though the game still booted and ran.

so i switched the pcb and got the same thing on two more pcbs.

so i plugged them into my supergun and they worked fine.

it took me a while but eventually i came up with "bad Power" and broke out the multimeter.

Yup. Problem solved.

get a dmm if you dont have one and start probing your power supply.see if the voltages are all what they should be. if not, Remove, replace.

[mvsfan]

also i dont know much about oem systems with a compressed hard drive but if its possible to somehow put that image onto a compact flash or something like it it will change catastrophic failure into a simple remove and replace operation provided youve made backups. also the cards dont fail as much.

[DeLuSioNal29]

There's a guy on e-bay that sells used replacement drives for various hard drive based PCBs.  He also sells marquees and repairs PCBs so knows his stuff.  http://stores.shop.ebay.com/ARCADE-SERVICES__W0QQ_armrsZ1

His username on ebay is arcade-services1

Good luck!

D

[mvsfan]

yeah if this is true, i hope it is, forget what i said. this guys got replacement Chds for 25 bucks, just take it.

[DeLuSioNal29]

You mean replacement HDDs, not CHDs.  He has the real deal which attaches to a genuine PCB.  CHDs are for MAME.

D

[Necroticart]

CHDs are for mame but all they are is a compressed image taken from the games hard drive and as far as I've read they can be imaged to a new hard drive or the new thing is to use a compact flash kit also the program used is chdman.exe hope this helps with your problem

here are a few links about it never had to restore an image myself before but good to know you can

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/15708-13-restore-actual-hard-drive
http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140119

also this info would be a nice addition some place in the wiki as it helps all those trying to restore a machine with a messed up hard disk

[dieseldogpi]

also i dont know much about oem systems with a compressed hard drive but if its possible to somehow put that image onto a compact flash or something like it it will change catastrophic failure into a simple remove and replace operation provided youve made backups. also the cards dont fail as much.

I heard this was possible, any one have any more info on it?  Mainly the adapter to connect the ribbon connector on the jamma harness to the flash drive?

[Kevin Mullins]

I heard this was possible, any one have any more info on it?  Mainly the adapter to connect the ribbon connector on the jamma harness to the flash drive?

Not much to the hardware side of things....... the adapter plugs into the main/mother board where the hard drive ribbon cable used to go and the CF card plugs into it. And a connector from the power supply also plugs into the adapter no different than the original hard drive.

Here's an example and some explanation. (I hadn't read through it to see how much info is there)
http://www.multigame.com/CF.html

[dieseldogpi]

If I have another working hard drive, does any one know where I can get the image if I can't pull it off of the old drive?

[Necroticart]

unfortunately we really can't give you the answer to that one as it is a grey area legally and also any info on aquiring roms is not permitted on the forums just seach around i'm sure you will find the CHD your looking for

[dieseldogpi]

gotchya, sorry, I didn't think of the chd's in the same group as the console emulators, my bad.