PSX DESR-7000 troubleshooting, no XMB, request for suggestions

I just received another PSX DESR-7000. Unfortunately I can not get it to boot to the XMB.

Normal booting it shows blue PSX splash screen for 3 seconds, goes black screen then stops outputting video in 24 seconds.

Boots FMCB 1.94 splash screen for about 20 seconds. Then screen changes with a flash of something on screen with mostly a black background then goes full black screen. Then screen flashes (like the video signal is changing) in about 12 to 17 second intervals. Video signal appears to remain active. Shutdown happens quickly with quick power button press. The power led by the power button goes red.

Each way the blue power led flashes slowly at the back of the system then goes solid in about 20 seconds from power up. Normal booting this goes solid just before video output stops. HDD access led does not ever show at this point.

Normal booting I have to force power down by holding the power button till the led by the power button goes red.

At next power button press the HDD access led flashes once then the same behavior occurs described above.

After second power up I have to hold the power button longer to get the system to power down. Generally holding the power button down two separate times to get the fan to stop spinning and red led lit by the the power button.

Tried the boot process with the hard drive powered from a separate power supply. No change in the behavior.

Took the hard disk drive out and verified all the sectors are readable with SpinRite. All checks out with no errors detected.

Does anyone have any other ideas for me to try out?

 

It's an HDD issue. Your PSX system will be like this for the rest of it's life. Once the HDD is gone, the XMB menu is gone as well, and gone forever at that.

The PSX system is amazing, when it works. That's why finding working ones is a pain nowadays.

Maybe @sp193 can back me up in this...

 

Out of curiosity I went and powered up my other DESR-7000 and now it will not boot to the XMB or FMCB 1.94. I get snow video output under a normal boot. Black screen under FMCB 1.94. HDD access led flashes on every boot. A little different behavior but still not usable. I think I am going to swap the hard disk drives to see what happens.

 

Yeah, the HDD has to be gone. Are you swapping HDD's from another PSX? If I remember correctly even that won't work, but I might be wrong on that. Anyway, welcome to the PSX troubles club @plasticrelic

 

ok. I got the XMB to boot on my original machine with the swapped hard disk drive. It took a couple of boots to be successful. I was moving the ribbon cable that connects to the main board. Not sure what to think at this moment.

 

Was able to get both hard disk drives to boot to XMB on my first machine. Can not get either drive to boot on my new machine. In the process of trying different things I now have one bad LED IR board. When hooked up the machine squeals with a high pitched sound. This happens on both machines as soon as power cord is attached.

 

Did you try holding R1 to enter uLaunchELF, when booting FMCB? If you don't do anything, then it will try to boot the XMB... which doesn't work on your console for one reason or another. The weird thing is that FMCB v1.94 is working on your console. If you had an actually dead/missing HDD unit, then it wouldn't work because it cannot mount __SYSCONF.........

If you can get into uLaunchELF (use the WIP versions from @AKuHAK), then try to access the HDD unit. The official versions of uLaunchELF cannot support the PSX (FMCB 1.94 comes with v4.42d).

It's known that HDDs can be swapped between consoles, but it's cloning that does not work.
If both HDDs can work with the other console, it seems likely that your troubled console has a hardware problem. Did you check the ribbon cable that connects the HDD to the mainboard? It sounds like it's loose or damaged, at least on your first console. This includes the end that is connected to the mainboard.

 

the PSX does auto boot into the Tuner you know

 

I figured it would fail to boot if the XMB was not accessible. I did figure out that the channel/input setting changes back to channel one when the hard disk drives are swapped.

@sp193 I have FMCB set to auto boot the FMCB CFG ELF. I did not try uLaunchELF. I will try working on this again this weekend and see if something obvious has failed on the main board of the faulty unit. Thanks for the info.

 

on the PSX (you probs know this) FMCB doesn't boot like the ps2, there is no browser for it to hack into so to speak...
Auto launching a compatible elf will work (Ulaunch does), I don't know if the little green ones work however..

 

Even though it has been some months since I was working on this I figured I would follow up before I give up completely. Unfortunately I do not have any good news. Took the working HDD out and tried it in a system I received without a HDD. That system did not load XMB fully. System loads to the XMB but it sticks on the blue bubble for a while then locks up. The HDD does load the XMB fully when it is in the other PSX. So I am stuck at the moment with three non-functioning PSXs with one known good HDD.

I did dump two HDDs with HxD hex editor if anyone is interested in looking at the encrypted data.

One was dumped multiple times due to either errors in the drive or my cobbled mess of a host. Finally got a full dump without errors but kept all the failed attempts.

Reviewing the data I found a repeating sequence that is present in the data. I was looking at the live data on the physical device to see the corresponding sector addresses and the dumped data at the same time. Going from memory it seamed to repeat every sector or every other sector of the small target I was studying. Not sure why you would want to take up so much space with the same information.

On a side note, I have one PSX that as soon as I turn it on it starts recording to the HDD. Can anyone walk me through, maybe with some screen shots, on how to cancel the recording? I have a lot of empty recordings on the XMB. And how to delete the unwanted recordings?

 

What's wrong with the other two PSX consoles?

Do you know if this PSX that locks up, has the same firmware version as the one that you took the HDD unit from?
Perhaps, the firmware versions of the DVRP must match the version of the XMB that is on the HDD.

I don't know what you're looking at exactly, but everything (including empty sectors) is encrypted.
The disk should have the APA layout, for the lower 40GB ("lba28" region). You may notice some repeats (i.e. __empty partitions) because this is APA.
The remainder of the space belongs to the "lba48" region. I think that it is also APA because of the device names (dvr_hdd and dvr_pfs), but it might not be the same as the old APA format that is used on the CEX PS2.

Sorry, someone else will have to help you with this. The manual is available from the SONY website, so you could also ask someone else (who can understand Japanese) to help you find the part about stopping the recordings.

 

One has a bad IR/power switch board and blown fuses on the motherboard. Just squeals when plugged into the power outlet. Ran out of donor boards to pull good fuses from. Not about to pay Sony $20+ a fuse when I can get whole boards for about the same price.

The one I was describing at the beginning of the thread might have some problem with the host HDD controller or other associated problems causing the host to fault.

That is unknown. I do not know how to determine what firmware version is on each of the DVRPs. But I was thinking that mismatched firmware from donor and target would be a possibility for the failure. Or less likely there might be a problem with the disk size being the wrong size compared to what it expects should be installed? i.e. 250 GB in lieu of 160GB or vice versa.

The byte sequence is 512 bytes long. When it is present it usually repeats every 512 bytes.

It is interesting that I do have many 00h bytes present elsewhere on the disk. I assumed that those bytes are empty. Maybe unwritten areas of the disk?

Might be that that repeating sequence is actually encrypted empty space?

I attached my notes and the binary chunk if you would like to see what I have.

I might dive into it in my next attempt. I do have a hard copy to reference as well.