Just got my DDA-5005 from E-Bay and shipped from Thailand. It was listed as untested and was running on the pictures taken for the offer. One price offer later I was proud owner of a DDA-5005A XL.
I did my homework in advance and found this awsome forum with tons of info and tools to get this units working again even if they are broken.
Just a short shoutout to this community: Thanks to everyone contributing to this topic and sharing their knowledge, experience and work. All this helped me with my first babysteps getting this unit disassembled and basically tested.
And this is where my journey starts:
I got the unit well packet with no damages on the outside beside on of the feet on the back. The Unit seems to come from Maxtor (last calibration 2013). The Unit was built in 2004.
The first external inspection shows no wear on the front connectors and no other damages from a longer storage. My mood was getting better and better.
Next should be the first Power-Cycle. This unit boots nicely and the HDD had no click of death so far.
X-Stream starts nicely too and this where I am not sure what I see:
All four channels semm to work and if I switch to 50R termination I get a signal on all four channel
Channel one Sine, channel two sqaure, channel three rectangular and channel four puls. Alls signals overlay and have a base frequqnecy of about 3 MHz. Is this some Kind of reference/calibration signal ?
As my LPA-SMA adapter are on their way and will arrive later this week, i can not give any signal externally to the channels.
After opening the unit I inspected the mainboard and internal fans:
- Mainboard has some blown caps
- not a lot of dust inside --> nice
- after removing fan of cpu cooler ther was some dust so maybe it was cleaned one time.
- two screws are missing inside from the mounting plate of the two big fans in the front of the unit. Somebody was in here before.
Maybe from calibration ?
Maybe they have been replaced.
- PSU does not make funny noises so far (will be checked and Caps replaced)
- HDD has both partitions and it seems that all info is present on second partition
Maybe you guys can help me on my way pimping this unit and getting it back to old glory. First step would be understanding this signals displayed.
I hat a peek inside the Service Menu and hat a look in the communication errors to the subsystems and there were no errors. First thing in my mind would be that his is good news.
What should be the first test to find out what is going on or should I first go for hardware upgrade (Mainboard and HDD) ?
I will take some photos of the unit and upload it when I work on it next time. Let me know what to take pictures of.
Here is what I want to do on the unit:
- Upgrade Mainboard / CPU with one that has at least SATA (Not sure if i want to go for Mainboard without AGP and new display or "old" graphics-card)
- Upgrade to Win XP or later (not sure so far what will be the hurdels)
- Upgrade of X-Stream
- maybe try to get licences running
- Fan replacement of the old turbines
What I have in my lab:
- Spectrum analyzer up to 3.5 GHz
- Oscilloscove 500 MHz WaveJet
- Signal generator
- Counter
- usual stuff (multimeter, cables, adapters ....)