TC4100 Power Distribution documentation ?

[Jim_McCarthy]

I'm trying to salvage the tower case, dual redundant power supplies, and hot-swap SCSI drive cage of an old TC4100 netserver, by installing a newer ATX motherboard capable of supporting dual Xeon socket-604 CPUs up to 3.6GHz and 8Gb or more of RAM. So far so good, but I'm stuck regarding what to do (if anything) with the cables that run from the TC4100's "power distribution board" to the connector on the former TC4100 motherboard called "Misc Signal Cable to Power Distribution Board" (see right side of Figure 3-8, page 34, of the TC4100 Operations and Maintenance Guide). Not surprisingly, there is no corresponding connector on the motherboard I've installed as part of my upgrade.

Questions:

(1) Do the signals carried by this cable simply provide power supply and/or power distribution status to the TC4100 motherboard, not essential to proper power supply function? Hence if I leave this cable disconnected, the TC4100 power supply subsystem will still function properly? Or...

(2) Does the power distribution board look for voltage levels or open/closed pin connections from the motherboard via this cable? Hence to enable the TC4100 power supply subsystem to function properly (without a real TC4100 motherboard), I would need to tie certain pins on the "Misc Signal" motherboard connector together, or to ground, or to +3V or the like?

(3) The CPUs I'm installing have their own fan-forced heat sinks, so for now I'm leaving out the original large main six-fan assembly from the mid-section of the TC4100. But this fan unit plugs directly into the TC4100's power distribution board. Will not having these fans present to draw any current (power) trigger any fail-safe within the TC4100 power distribution board that would cause it to not supply power to motherboard and/or disk drives? (Eventually my plan is to retain one of each pair of the dual-fans-in-series, for a single column of 3 fans instead of two columns of 6 fans total, but if there is a fail-safe circuit on the power distribution board, would anything short of the original 6 fans operating trigger a power supply shutdown?)

Any ideas ?

(4) The ATX motherboard I've installed is from an HP xw8200 workstation. Connecting the main 24-pin power supply connector to the xw8200 motherboard, and routing +12V drive power to the 8-pin "CPU power" connector on the xw8200 motherboard, and not connecting at all the "Misc Signal Cable" from the TC4100 Power Distribution Board (nor supplying any input power to the PCI-Express connector on the xw8200 motherboard, since I'm not using a PCI-Express graphics card), the power/reset/LED status code I get from the xw8200 motherboard is LED Red 4 flashes, indicating a problem related to supplied power.

(5) Should I also include in my hardware upgrade installation of a bona fide xw8200 workstation power supply, to replace the TC4100's dual redundant supplies [and power distribution board] ? (I've already checked into this, and the xw8200 power supply's physical dimensions are not a good match to the existing dual-redundant supplies in the TC4100 case). But assuming I can physically find somewhere to shoe-horn in a regular xw8200 workstation power supply, I'd then be stuck with the difficulty of not having pinout of the power connections INTO the TC4100 hot swap SCSI drive cage.

Can anyone point me to documentation of the TC4100's power distribution subsystem ? (This would likely help me with the challenges I'm facing here on several fronts...).

Thanks,

-- Jim

[Jim_McCarthy]

Since March this computer upgrade project has been set aside, but I'd like to get back into it again in the near future.

Is there anyone on these Forums who might have any insight into the signals carried over the narrow ribbon cable between the TC4100 power distribution board and the TC4100 motherboard's "Misc Signals" connector ?

Any pointers to relevant documentation on the TC4100's power distribution subsystem would also be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again,

--Jim