So Wednesday night my desktop locked up, which was quite unusual, then it was running slow so I shut it down and it never came back up. It wasn’t until Thursday night that I was able to determine that the Windows Partition of my primary hard drive had crashed. Somehow the formatting had become currupted such that the PC could see the drive but had no idea what was on it, or how things were stored.
My brother had dropped off his PC, which wasn’t working right, so I spent time fixing his (which turned out to be driver incompatability issues… this is the third time this year where I’ve seen windows update upgrade drivers to new versions that don’t work… yay). Once that was squared away I got to work on building another PC from scratch so that I could not only get back online but use it as a tool to help recover (or at least determine the extent of damage to) my crashed hard drive.
I spent most of my day on Saturday working on this… Saturday night however my Marantz SR6200 decided to catch fire… this was turning out to be an expensive weekend. Thankfully shortly after the fire I was able to finish diagnostics on the crahsed hard drive and repaired the borked formatting…
Saturday night this is how my office looked:
From left to right: an Xbox I just finished fixing, my post fire SR6200, the PC I threw together, and my desktop with it’s hard drives pulled out the side.
The desktop is running well enough to get my files backedup but in general it’s acting like it’s got brain damage, some programs just flat out wont run, others will run for a while and then just stop working, and it’s a whole lot slower than it was before. I’ve got everything backed up now and a new hard drive on order. In the mean time I’m using the piece-built PC, it’s only a P3 700MHz but it gets the job done.
While finding the source of the fire in the Marantz wasn’t easy, it became pretty clear once I unbolted the amplifier board…
It looks like a major transistor failed. The part was an SAP16 NPN 1413 Darlington transistor made by Sanken Electric. I found replacements online for $2 a piece. Hopefully nothing else was damaged and the receiver will be back up and running with a fresh replacement.
Even if I do get it running again I’ll probably just sell it and buy a new Receiver. I’ve been shopping around online and a comparable replacement is in the realm of $1200 new… that’s with similar power and audio quality in addition to new features like support for HDMI 1.3a and HD audio formats.
I’m looking heavily at the Marantz SR6003 or SR7002 to replace this receiver, if anyone has any suggestions let me know.
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