DuoDock II: crash often and now do not boot

[jvernet]

Hello,

I recently acquired a DuoDockII, to fit my 230 inside. It was working like a charm for some week, then started crashing sometime, then more and more, and now, it won't even boot the Duo 230. PowerUp fine, but no chime. Sometime, the 230 make a dead chime with a SAD MAC error 0000000F or 0000000C and 0000001 or 0000003 on the second line.

If I let it for some hours unplugged, at least, it can boot, but crash and won't start again.

The 230 work perfectly in my DuoDock (not II), or alone, or with Dock and Dock mini.

I didn't tried yet with another Duo (another 230 and a 210). Any idea ? Power Supply? I reseated every cable (no moveable chips). There is no SCSI terminator in the DD, but there is one in the DDII. Tried with or without... No click of death.

No capacitor on the DDII motherboard (or not the round leaking ones).

The 230 is soooo slow in the Duodock ! Norton Info said that 230+Duodock II is nearly twice as fast as 230+Duodock (17 for CPU in the DDII, 14 in the DD, due to cache), FPU of course 3 times faster than DD, and graphics are more than 2 times faster with de DDII, even in thousand colors.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Not exactly the same symptoms but it does look familiar. 

http://lowendmac.com/2016/the-duo-dock-tick-of-death/

The DuoDock's PSU is infamously known to fail after some time. Mine doesn't work properly either (it tries to boot, then shutdowns altogether before reaching the desktop).

As the article says, there is one big capacitor in there that needs changing once the Dock starts experiencing issues with booting/ejecting etc.

You're better off replacing it anyway, even if it does not fix the booting problem right away... as it is bound to fail at some point. 

But IMO, your problem lies inside the PSU.

NB: BTW, welcome to the 68kmla. I know it's been a few months. But I didn't know until today you had an account here too 

 

[jvernet]

I will try to swap the power supply from the working DD to the DDII, before trying to change caps inside PSU.

 

[techknight]

you need to recap the PSU, as well as the logic board inside the DuoDock. 

You dont have any choice in the matter these days with this equipment.