Dear HP friends and MLDL experts,
can anyone of you help me here ?
I had a FATAL accident with my most important and beloved device, my urgently needed HP-41 MLDL-RAMBOX, I am really a bit desperate. Certainly the OS crashed and I do not know how to recover it ! :-((((
Yesterday I certainly killed the soft OS of my W&W RAMBOX of my HP-41CY.
It is a built-in 64k W&W RAMBOX II which supports two 32k blocks of page 8-F, “Rambox a“ and “Rambox b“. Per software command PG<> you can switch between the blocks. Yesterday I used my HEPAX module which normally identifies and uses the visible RAMBOX-RAM as 8 HEPAX RAM pages. In the past this always worked fine (although it may not be common to use both, RAMBOX and HEPAX at the same time, but by this you can use the HEPAX functionality and have full 32k access).
This time unfortunately a conflict happened the HP-41 to freeze. I had to briefly remove the battery and make a master clear after that. Further I made a “Rambox Clear“.
After that I had lost the 4k soft operating system (page 8) of my second RAMBOX block “b“ which is normally secure from being erased.
Formerly I have had no problems because HEPAX and RAMBOX seemed to coexist very well. But maybe I used a critical slot configuration with my plug-in modules, so the HP-41 froze after HEPAX installation.
Maybe some self-mapping by the HEPAX after its installation may have mapped the RAMBOX “b“ OS into another page and there it was not safe against being erased by the Rambox master clear (the RAMBOX soft OS is located at page 8, there I had plugged in my HEPAX module in order to temporarily deactivate it for giving full 32k access to the HEPAX RAM management which normally works well. Troughout the initializing process, the HEPAX is located at page 8 very briefly, there it deactivates the 4k RAMBOX OS and after that it maps itself into page 6, thus giving free all 32k of Quasi-ROM).
This is my explanation of the fatal accident, but maybe I am wrong.
I do not believe that the RAMBOX hardware is defect. I had made a full check of every single bit of the 64k by some stored checksum program maybe a week ago. The RAM and the OS “a“ and “b“ were all working properly. I also did nothing wrong with plugging the modules. I always secured that there were NO hot-plugins, so normally the hardware was not endangered. So I believe I “only“ killed the software.
When I want to switch from “Rambox a“ to “Rambox b“ by using PG<>, nothing happens anymore. It always remains “Rambox a“ which you can check by CAT 2. This 32k (28k+4k soft OS) block is working properly.
So, what can I do here ?
1) I have not yet had the opportunity to back up the OS ROM code of the RAMBOX (because of this damn lack of spare time :-( ). So I lost the ROM code “Rambox b“ which is certainly quite similar to “Rambox a“ but with very little modifications.
Does anyone of you have the ROM images “a“/“b“ of the W&W-RAMBOX II OS ?
2) How can I reload the soft OS into the second block of the RAMBOX RAM ? So how can I recover the software to again being able to access the other 32k block of RAM ?
Certainly this is a tough problem. I hope so much that someone of you can help me in my fatal and sad situation !!!
Thanks and best regards from Germany,
Werner
Edited: 18 Nov 2003, 3:03 a.m.