I’ve got a used Korg Kaptivator that will power on, but doesn’t seem to boot. The pads and backlights behind the displays come on, but never any actual images/data show up on the displays. Anyone know of common problems with this unit that I should check? I haven’t opened it up to see what’s going on inside yet - who knows, could just be swollen electrolytic caps. But I figured if any place had advice on this unit, it’d be here.
Failing that, does anyone know of any place that would actually service this ancient piece of gear?
i think those units had spinning hard drives in them, so that seems like an obvious point of failure and would probably result in that kind of “powers on but doesn’t boot” situation.
Yeah, it does have a hard drive, but I’d figure it would at least have a BIOS equivalent that would output some diagnostic info (at least beep or something) if the drive was toasted.
My instinct is caps, since I’ve dealt with a bunch of computers that did nutty things such as not POST or randomly turn themselves off and/or lock up when their caps on the motherboard were bad. Back then, fortunately work had a bunch of motherboards in storage, so we’d swap it out and go about our way if we saw leaky caps on it.
If we go a few days with no one having any bright ideas, I’ll go ahead and crack it open and see what’s inside. But it doesn’t look like it was designed to even be opened without a service manual, so that’s going to be an adventure in itself.
Many ‘integrated’ devices don’t have a traditional POST like a PC does. They simply halt at the first fault, which can be extremely frustrating for diagnosing.
Since this device has a spinning HDD, try listening to the drive. Really press your ear to the housing of the device (or, if you can open it, put your ear on the drive itself) while powering it on. Listen for the tell-tale repeating CLUNKITY-CLUNK of a failing drive.
Some other possible diagnostic things to try:
Try powering it on with the drive disconnected. Same result?
As you already stated, look for swollen/leaking/bulging caps (surface mount electrolytic caps can be tricky to spot when they have failed)
Check all ribbon cables for nicks, hard folds, cracks
Heh heh heh, yeah. I suspect that’s probably the row I have to hoe. It really doesn’t make any noise when powering it on now, so I expect it either has a very quiet hard drive (not unheard of for laptop drives from 2005 or so), isn’t getting to the point where it would spin up the drive, or the drive is dead in some fashion other than the click of death. Considering this machine has an operating system of some sort to load, it’s probably just a parts pile if the last situation is the case.
My dream was that someone would know a place to connect a serial cable or some other interface to get some debugging info. As it is, I’ll probably take a screwdriver to it and see what’s going on inside this weekend.
I repaired an Entrancer probably 15+ years ago. I don’t rememeber that being too difficult to disassemble, and they share very similar case construction. Out of curiosity, where are you located?
