hydrothunder hard drive

[Sarver Systems]

So we moved a hydrothunder down a flight of steps.

If the owner had told me it had a hard drive inside it, I would've removed it first.

Needless to say, now it won't boot up.

The PC turns on, the main boards fire up, the forcefeedback kicks on, all the lights on the front light up, and the monitor turns on, but all I get is a few beeps.

I hooked up an LCD to the video out, same thing, no picture.

I reseated the RAM and the CPU, same thing.

So now I think we crashed the hard drive.

What all is involved in replacing the hard drive?

I assume I can use any off-the shelf IDE hard drive of the same or larger capacity, but what about loading the software?

Is this something that can be downloaded from somewhere, like a ROM?

Can it be copied from a working machine? If so, what is involved with that?

I am very well versed on PC repair (owned my own shop for 10+ years) but I don't know what to do if it isn't running Windows.

[Malenko]

use the CHD dump to reimage the drive/replacement drive. Might need a custom boot rom to not boot a specific type of hard drive.  Is the drive spinning? any noises?clicking?etc?

[Sarver Systems]

The drive does spin up, but its making a very high pitched sound, and it powers down after a few seconds.

Not a single thing on the screen, not even a blip.

[horizon]

I apologize ahead of time, but I don't know much about traditional arcades, but:

The beeps you mentioned, do these machines have error beeps like standard BIOS error beeps?

[Sarver Systems]

Yup, at this point, I'm working with it as a traditional PC.

I'm not getting any further enough that it thinks its an arcade game.

I have the drive removed and I plan to run diagnostics on it. I expect it to fail though.

[Malenko]

The drive does spin up, but its making a very high pitched sound, and it powers down after a few seconds.

Not a single thing on the screen, not even a blip.

well I have bad news for ya, even with no drive attached you should still be able to get to the operator menu, I could with both KI games.  Flip the service switch with the drive not connected and see if the service menu shows up.

[Sarver Systems]

I dont recall seeing a service switch, but let me check that.

[Malenko]

Id also advocate testing the monitor with another game.

[Sarver Systems]

I put a different monitor on the game. No video.

[knave]

I'm sure you've thought of all of these but If it were me:

1: Pull HD and see if I can access it on a Computer...
2: Put a PC or some other video source to the monitor see if you get picture. Even a normal PC should show something even at 15 HZ.
3: Try to boot with a different HD, should at least show the bios with vertical flipping.
4: Re-seat Everything, Cables, Video converter, Power...if it unplugs re-plug it.

Hope that helps.

[Sarver Systems]

Can the original P2 PC be swapped out for something newer?

If the HD passes tests, my next step will be to replace the whole PC.

[lilshawn]

verify the computer is working first.

while I don't know specifically about this machine, if it is indeed a standard computer, you should be able to hook an LCD or other display to the VGA port on it and get into the BIOS and see if it's coming up. pull everything out and boot just the board cpu/ram. take out any cards or other accessories.

if you can get video out of it, the drive is probably toast. i'd still put it in a known good computer and see if you can do a data check on it and see if the sectors are still good. seagate and maxtor make some good free software for checking drives.

if you still can't get video swap the power supply for a known good one. maybe it gave up the ghost.

swap the CPU and RAM with known good ones.

you can probably google yourself up a "hydrothunder CHD" and download it from one of THOSE sites and "burn it" onto a new drive. MAME comes with a CHD program that can rip data off a game drive, but it will also take the CHD and put it back on. tutorials are on the mame site for that too.

you probably won't have much luck swapping hardware for anything different than the exact board it currently uses. they write the program to use that specific hardware and no others to keep cost down, and force vendors to purchase replacement parts from them.

[Sarver Systems]

UPDATE:

I tested the HD on my laptop, and the HD is readable. I can see 3 partitions, 2 of which have files on them, including a hydrothunder.exe file.

The drive is very loud, so I want to clone this drive to another drive ASAP.

[Malenko]

use CHDMan and put the MAME CHD on a new drive.

same premise as this how to for Ki2: http://www.thekillerinstinctproject.com/kiproject/chdman.html

[Sarver Systems]

The HD has an empty partition on it. Do I need to recreate that as well?

[Malenko]

Not likely.   If you are going to put the chd on a new drive it won't hurt  to try

[matsadona]

There has been comments about no video, but what about game sounds/music?

If the drive is accessible from another PC, I would make a disk image (with Norton Ghost or similar), and copy i to a CF-card. It might be the situation that there is another issue than the drive, but a mechanical HD will die eventually...

If you make a new drive (from a CHD) I would still recommend doing that with a CF-card. There are plenty of IDE to CF adapters available everywhere.

[Sarver Systems]

OMG, why didn't I think of that???

So copy the HD using CHD to a CF card.

Insert the CF card into an adapter.

Then boot from that?

I'd imagine boot times will be WAY faster?

[lilshawn]

CF cards aren't much faster than hard drives (based on the same IDE interface)....more reliable anyways.

[Sarver Systems]

Reliability would be nice.

Also, this HD is super noisy. It has that high pitch whine.

I'll also swap out the fans for much quieter ones.

[MTPPC]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HYDRO-THUNDER-HARD-DRIVE-WARRANTY-/150661759885?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item231424038d

It's not mine and I never ordered one.

[lilshawn]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HYDRO-THUNDER-HARD-DRIVE-WARRANTY-/150661759885?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item231424038d

It's not mine and I never ordered one.

EEEK 

dat HTML formatting tho.