Merging Technologies

I've got a Pyramix machine from a friend of mine to fix which has a strange problem and I was wondering if anyone has come across it before, or can offer any suggestions?

The history of the machine is this:
Worked absolutely fine for about 4 years then the motherboard died on it. I replaced the board for him a few months ago... went for a cheap Aopen one as it was so cheap that it was worth the money to see if all the other components still worked rather than build a whole new computer. This was the only new board I could find with S478 although I'm not usually a fan of Aopen. Anyway, everything worked absolutely fine for about 3 weeks, tested with the heaviest projects we could find and during those three weeks it was used pretty heavily with no problems. His machine is an MB2 Dual.

Then it started coming up with various messages along the lines of can't find mykerinos, kernel error, initialisation error, VS3 error, that kind of thing. The first couple of days of this it would then work on restarts but after that it would fail every time.
The first thing I tried was moving the Mykerinos to another slot. It worked the first two times we used it and then the problem came back again.

Now he's away on holiday for a few weeks I have his machine next to mine and can go into it a bit deeper. I've tried my MB5 in his machine and it works perfectly... so immediately I'm thinking that his MB2 was damamged by whatever caused the old motherboard to fail. However I then put his MB2 into my computer expecting to get the problem and confirm it.... Guess what - works fine! Swap them back and the MB2 still won't even show up in device manager on his machine, but my MB5 will.

So now the situation is:

His machine will work fine with my MB5 but won't recognise his MB2.
My machine works fine with both.

Are there any differences between the MB2 and the MB5 that would cause these problems? Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions about what to try next?

I've tried things like wiggling cards etc and cannot make the problem with the MB2 go away, and cannot make it happen in the other computer!

The motherboard readout of PSU voltages looks ok to me, although I'm not ruling out a PSU problem and my next move it to swap that over and see if there's a problem.

If anyones got any thoughts I'd love to hear them! I'd rather not have to scrap the computer and replace the lot - if there is a cheaper solution that would be better! And If I did do that I wouldn't want it to then turn out to be the DSP card a few weeks later.

Cheers!

Hi there,

Are the Windows OS and Pyramix versions *exactly* the same across the two machines?

Best,

Graemme

Hi Graemme,

Yes, the Windows OS and Pyramix versions are identical, and both computers have exactly the same settings in both Windows and the Pyramix settings file.

There are some hardware differences, but would hardware differences cause the problem to occur only with an MB2 and not an MB5? Also there were no hardware changes between the time when the machine was working flawlessly and when it started to have problems. As far as I know there were no software settings changed either, unless changed by a Windows background task or service.

The version of Pyramix is 5.1 SP3 on both machines and I lent him my machine to finish off a couple of projects, so it has the same Pyramix settings files, keyboard shortcuts and projects loaded on. The only difference in Pyramix is that mine is a Music Pack and his is a Broadcast Pack. My machine has always been XP SP3 which works with both cards, and the other machine was SP2 but I updated to SP3 to make them identical and see if that had any effect which it didn't.

Cheers,

Shaun