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Zenith Z-Station 510 Boot Problems

K

Klankins

Member
Joined
Oct 16, 2015
Messages
17
Location
Cleveland, Ohio, USA
I got a Zenith 510 recently and I am having some issues getting it to boot. It did have a bad bios battery but it was a 3v BR1225 so I snipped that off and replaced it with a CR2032 holder and a fresh battery.

When I boot the system it tells me the system configuration is invalid. Sometimes I am able to get into the bios but when I go to save and quit I get a missing or invalid nv ram token message. If I bypass the bios setup it gets to the next screen where it would try to boot from one of the drives but just hangs there.

Just wondered if anyone had come across an issue like this. I could not find any info on that error anywhere.

I asked on /r/retrobattlestations as well and someone responded it might be that the eeprom has gone bad. That might be. It does save the changes I make but I always get the error when I do a save and quit from the bios.

R76yfoN.jpg
 
No experience with this machine, but perhaps the BIOS setup isn't fully initialising the NVRAM? Are there utility programs for this machine that you can run to adjust the NVRAM as well? They might be able to reset it. It is of course possible the CMOS RAM chip is faulty as well. It wouldn't be an EEPROM as those don't need batteries. You'd need to find a program - if one exists - capable of testing the CMOS NVRAM chip to get an answer for that. But certainly even one bit that is corrupted would cause the NVRAM checksum to fail.

I've seen some BIOSes freeze instead of booting when they are looking for a boot device that doesn't exist. Usually if you have a floppy plugged in as A: they will at least try booting from that.
 
Ah that does make sense that it would not be an EEPROM since it has a battery.

It came with a TEAC combo floppy drive and it did look like it would seek both drives during the POST. I'll take that out and try it with individual drives and see if there is any difference.

I'm a bit new to working with older computers so I am not entirely sure what I need to test on the board but I am willing to give it a shot.

Here is what the board looks like and a link to the other pictures I took while tearing it down. http://http://imgur.com/a/bXlxs

B2kR5Qu.jpgEDLu8Fe.jpg
 
From the photos on your album it looks like you have quite the mix of RAM there, I would start with one single SIMM (if the system can run on one, some needed matched pairs), you may have bad RAM or a mismatch of RAM (and those are certainly not matched, one is 60ns double sided, and one is 70ns single sided), and that could be causing the freezeups.
 
RWallmow said:
From the photos on your album it looks like you have quite the mix of RAM there, I would start with one single SIMM (if the system can run on one, some needed matched pairs), you may have bad RAM or a mismatch of RAM (and those are certainly not matched, one is 60ns double sided, and one is 70ns single sided), and that could be causing the freezeups.
Click to expand...

I have been testing without any of the extra ram. It should have 4mb on board but I noticed that only 3mb is showing in the BIOS so maybe a section of that on board memory has gone bad.
 
Some BIOSes are showing only extended memory (or base and extended memory separately), so on-board memory may be still good.
 
pcdata76 said:
Some BIOSes are showing only extended memory (or base and extended memory separately), so on-board memory may be still good.
Click to expand...

It does look like it breaks it up into base and extended but it still does not add up for me.

Someone on Reddit posted how they had used an arduino to test the ram in their Apple IIgs. It looked like a nice way to do it and I have an arduino uno so I ordered some clips since my ram is soldiered to the board. When those show up I am going to give that a try.
http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/252/testing-dram-using-an-arduino
 
Your album link isn't working. Also there is a Sam's 359-17 but have to pay $15. Anyone have it to share?
 
retrogear said:
Your album link isn't working. Also there is a Sam's 359-17 but have to pay $15. Anyone have it to share?
Click to expand...


Yep I noticed that link somehow ended up with an extra http:// in it but for some reason I can't edit my posts. Here is the fixed link. http://imgur.com/a/bXlxs

It looks like that SAMS tech document is actually for a Zenith radio rather than the ZDS 510 computer. I actually found all the documentation for the computer at ftp://packardbell.com. Just grabbed everything that started with ZDS and started digging through. Really interesting stuff in there but I think fixing this is just going to come down to identifying the failing memory.
 
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I see a blue jumper J31 by the battery which I assume gets removed for an external battery. You could verify 3V is on that jumper so you know your battery is making contact in the circuit then pull that jumper and let it set unpowered for maybe 10 minutes to totally clear the cmos then put it back on and apply power. Newer motherboards usually have a cmos clear. Changing the battery could have glitched the cmos. I still think it's corrupt cmos. Did you find jumper info? There are a lot of config jumpers ...
 
retrogear said:
I see a blue jumper J31 by the battery which I assume gets removed for an external battery. You could verify 3V is on that jumper so you know your battery is making contact in the circuit then pull that jumper and let it set unpowered for maybe 10 minutes to totally clear the cmos then put it back on and apply power. Newer motherboards usually have a cmos clear. Changing the battery could have glitched the cmos. I still think it's corrupt cmos. Did you find jumper info? There are a lot of config jumpers ...
Click to expand...

Yep that jumper does get removed for the battery. I have actually tried my external battery rather than using the onboard one just to see if maybe there was an issue with my replacement but I get the same results. It does seem to save the changes I make and no longer gives me the dead battery message when I have either the new CR2032 or the external battery connected but the invalid NV ram token 003 error comes up regardless of the configurations I have tried.

I did find a slightly more detailed jumper listing in the documentation on the PackardBell FTP but the one on the sticker inside the case is not too bad. I'm not at home to post up the manual but I attached the picture of the sticker.BzYW7ZU.jpg
 
The new memory came and seems to read just fine. Unfortunately it did not solve my issue. I had hoped the problem was coming from the on board memory which gets disabled when you max the expansion memory.

My clips to build the chip tester are still on their way but I found a replacement board if I am unable to get this one going.
 
Still working on testing the sram on the original board. The replacement board did arrive though and is working great so far. The only issue I have run into is finding a hard drive that will read properly. It does not seem to like the larger drives. I've tried to find out if there is an updated bios for it but have not had much luck.
 
Klankins said:
Still working on testing the sram on the original board. The replacement board did arrive though and is working great so far. The only issue I have run into is finding a hard drive that will read properly. It does not seem to like the larger drives. I've tried to find out if there is an updated bios for it but have not had much luck.
Click to expand...

Check out "Ontrack Disk Manager" it will let you overcome many BIOS limitations, though you could also try the XTIDE BIOS (get someone to burn you a ROM chip) in the ROM socket of a NIC (or some other card with an AUX ROM socket).
 
RWallmow said:
Check out "Ontrack Disk Manager" it will let you overcome many BIOS limitations, though you could also try the XTIDE BIOS (get someone to burn you a ROM chip) in the ROM socket of a NIC (or some other card with an AUX ROM socket).
Click to expand...

That Ontrack Disk Manager looks like it might be just the thing I need. I'll give it a try later tonight. Thanks.
 
So far not much luck with the Ontrack Disk Manager. My time has been limited but tried the Seagate version with a 160gig Seagate drive. It did read it on my Pentium II system "but that would have found it anyway". On the Zenith it is unable to launch the GUI for the software with version 10 and with the other version it is unable to see the drive.

Hopefully I will have more time this weekend to give it a better shot.

I have still been trying to track down the PCI backplane for the system but have not had much luck. I picked up a lot on ebay that had a motherboard, backplane, and sound card but the backplane was not compatible. It was not all bad though, the motherboard is from an IBM 330 with a 100mhz Pentium 1 and 32mb of ram. The sound card is a SB AWE32 3990 and the whole lot was about $40 shipped so no complaints there.
 
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