Re: Fostex D2424/LV

[Howard Jones]

Hi everyone,

I'm posting this for those of you who might be using a Fostex D2424 or D2424LV. My company does the repairs on Fostex and we have come across several problems of late about which I thought I'd give a heads up. Two issues, both to do with the cable that joins the controller to the mainframe:-

[1] You CANNOT, under any circumstances, hot plug this cable. That is, you cannot plug in the controller cable whilst the mainframe is powered up. Now, for old dinosaurs like me, this is a no-brainer. However, it has become apparent that younger users, maybe influenced by the fact that you can hot-plug things like USB, mistakenly believe that you can hot plug anything. Sorry, not so. The best policy is to assume that you cannot hot plug anything until and unless you categorically know otherwise.

[2] You CANNOT use a standard VGA cable as a controller cable in place of the extension cable that Fostex sell for this purpose. We have just had a client do this, following erroneous info that he found on a US website. The result was that he smoked his machine.

The results of you failing to follow the above advice is that you will smoke your machine. If you are lucky, you blow a small and fairly inexpensive interface PCB. If you are unlikely, you blow either the controller itself or the main PCB in the mainframe, both of which we have seen. Not pretty and not cheap.

Good job security for me, but really I have other things I could be doing and you'll enjoy keeping your dough.

Contact me if you need further advice.

Howard

[Ausrock]

Obviously some people don't read their manual, as, at least in my D160 literature, it was made perfectly clear that the unit had to be turned off if you needed to connect or disconnect either the control face OR the foot switch.

On the other hand, a "standard" VGA type cable works fine with the earlier D series recorders, as a matter of fact, I seem to recall that I was told about it by tech staff at the former Fostex distributor. Also, it is quite common to replace the original h/drive caddy with a cheap generic unit available at most computer shops.

ChrisO

[Howard Jones]

Read the manual? You on drugs there ChrisO? Reading the manual is what you do after you have plugged everything up and it don't work...

Seriously though, between Sydney & Melbourne there have been a relatively large number of D2424s that have been smoked. Hence the post.

[Kurt]

Slightly OT I know but this just reminded me! I bought a network card for my D2424 a while ago off ebay but don't have the cable or zip drive to update the firmware to allow the unit to even see that it has a network card in it now. Does anyone know of anybody in Canberra who could flash it for me?

[Howard Jones]

Kurt,

Do you have a CD bay fitted?

Howard

[Kurt]

No I don't, does it use IDE or SCSI? I think I chucked out my old SCSI drive, but have heaps of IDE ones laying around.

[Howard Jones]

Hi Kurt,

I have looked into this since I asked that question... I was hoping that it was possible to do the upgrade from a file on CD, but it isn't. The upgrade procedure is quite involved and, being contained in the service manual, I get the impression that Fostex don't think that this is something that the end user should do for themselves.

PM me for a further discussion.

Howard