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T3100e broke during use

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Aquaboy11

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Feb 26, 2018
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Recently I bought this T3100e for like 15 bucks, including the bag and floppy disks. The CMOS battery was empty as expected and DOS wasn't installed. When I was looking through the bios settings it suddenly displayed this screen, see attachment. Now whenever I boot it, the power light comes on, the HDD light turns red for a brief moment, and it shows a blank screen with a few vertical lines. After that I opened it up and cleaned it inside out. Inside I found some corrosion on a chip which I could brush off. Other than that everything looks fine.

Any idea how I would go about troubleshooting this issue? The service manual doesn't include this scenario (or I haven't found it yet)
 

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Have you tried reseating all the socketed chips you can find?
Do you smell something pungent from the area behind the screen lid?
How do the capacitors on the motherboard look?
 
I visually inspected the capacitors, reseated all the socketed chips and cables, but unfortunately that didn't work. Today, almost 3 months later, I cleaned a chip of which a few pins were corroded. When I turned it on it finally displayed the bios again. But while I was trying to get it to boot from one of the floppies, it crashed and stopped working again.
 
Aquaboy11 said:
I visually inspected the capacitors, reseated all the socketed chips and cables, but unfortunately that didn't work. Today, almost 3 months later, I cleaned a chip of which a few pins were corroded. When I turned it on it finally displayed the bios again. But while I was trying to get it to boot from one of the floppies, it crashed and stopped working again.
Click to expand...

Capacitors are difficult to diagnose sometimes. Their failure may not be obvious unless you de-solder them. (I found one leaking in my Toshiba T3200SXC's power supply that looked fine until I took it out)

As for the chip, I'm glad that you found one of the possible problems. You might need to replace it fully, though. What kind of chip is it? Is it the traditional DIP (straight into the board pins)?
 
I've got one of those. The HDD in those is not IDE so probably not replaceable. I've put a lot of work into figuring that out a long time ago. That drive is very unlikely to work at this point because the platter coating liquefies with time, just by sitting there. They were, in fact, one of the worst drives ever made. If you're HDD was working, it would be a miracle and it may well have failed after a quick run after you got it. I'm just saying all this because it's perhaps useful information to you. And, who knows, could a failed HDD cause what you're seeing?

I absolutely love those plasma screens though. They're beautiful. :)
 
MikeS said:
Are you sure you're not talking about a T3100?
Click to expand...

You're totally correct. :) My apologies for jumping the gun there. I just went and had a look and it's not a T3100e but rather a T3100/20 that I have.

Looking at the spec sheet, I see the T3100e had a Conner Peripherals CP-3011 HDD with an IDE interface. That's a much more desirable model to have at this stage in their history.
 
T-Squared said:
Capacitors are difficult to diagnose sometimes. Their failure may not be obvious unless you de-solder them. (I found one leaking in my Toshiba T3200SXC's power supply that looked fine until I took it out)

As for the chip, I'm glad that you found one of the possible problems. You might need to replace it fully, though. What kind of chip is it? Is it the traditional DIP (straight into the board pins)?
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's a DIP. It's the Toshiba T9761 chip that had some blue corrosion on it.
 
Difficult for a remote diagnosis, but with such garbage on screen my first suspicion is usually video RAM, I'd make sure to rule out that first if you have a replacement.
 
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