RISC PC (Issue 1) will not play nice with any Podules (apart from a NIC in the NIC slot)

[Trapper]

<<Cross Posted from the Acorn Facebook group>>

Help! Any ideas what is wrong with my RISC PC?

Any podule I use is never detected correctly. I've had two ScanLight podules, a ScanLight with Video 256 podule and a Morely 16-bit SCSI podule. All of them appear as seen in the screenshot via *Podules.

I've used both my 2 slot backplane and my 4 slot backplane. The 4 slot is brand new. I've tried every combination of podule and backplane. At worst I get an Internal Error and a lock up before !Boot, at best with the ScanLight in Podule 0 and SCSI in Podule 3 the OS loads, but nothing from the Podules. No SCSIFS or SCSICDFS under *Modules.

Could track damage that I can't see, and that affects nothing else be the cause of this? Garbled communication between podule card, backplane, backplane slot, MOBO to CPU and then to the OS?

Tried with 3.70 in ROM, 4.02 softloaded, 4.02 in ROM, 4.39 softload, 6.20 softload etc. With StrongARM CPU and ARM610, with the 486 card and without it, with the NIC and without it etc.

Unless I'm missing a setting somewhere along the line either every single full size podule I have are fscked or my RISC PC is fscked!

Many Delete power ons. The Morely SCSI utils just say "No SCSI card installed" exactly the same as the ScanLight software.

Are the podules supposed to report as "Expansion card 0: Extended type &0000"?

*Podules listing

This is the error when it occurs on POST. Not every time and seems quite random. I've also had it lock RISC OS 4.02 up once and the power cycle pushed this error message out.

Also showing off my new AKF-53 monitor!

Error on POST (with AKF-53 showing off!)

[steve3000]

Track damage (assuming you had battery leakage at sombre point?) or a dirty/corroded socket.

I had the same from a RiscPC which I repaired a few years ago - I suspect the podule is being detected but it's ROM loader code isn't passing checksum after making it across to the computer.

For me it was quite easy to trace the fault, I just tracked the address and data lines from podule socket, as I recall it was a damaged address line on mine.

[ajw99uk]

I've seen same symptoms with a Cumana SCSI2 podule (or three), but other podules OK. DMA transfers for IDE are also flaky, so could be some other underlying trouble, but for the SCSI card(s) it seems pretty clearly related to a failure to load the modules from flash ROM. See post a few weeks ago for details.