Edirol CG-8 Repair Guide

The Edirol CG-8 is a "visual synthesiser" made by Roland in 2005.

Inside the Edirol CG-8

• Main Power Board

• Power Distribution Board

• PC Board

• Power Switch Board

• MIDI Board

• Disk Drive Board

• USB Control Surface

Computer Hardware

VIA EPIA M Motherboard

The CG-8 uses a VIA EPIA M mini ITX PC motherboard produced in the early to mid-2000s. It uses the VIA CLE266 chipset and comes with 512MB RAM in its single UDIMM memory slot and a 2.5in 40Gb hard drive, connected via IDE. The Retro Web provides comprehensive information about the board and notes that - like many computers of its era - it is prone to "faulty or leaking electrolytic capacitors".

• VIA EPIA-M at The Retro Web

Notes:

512Mb RAM

The RAM is in the form of a single 512Mb DDR UDIMM PC2100. According to the user manual, the motherboard has a maximum RAM size of 1GB.

= 40Gb Hard Drive

Notes: The 2.5" IDE connector is not well-suited to regularly plugging and unplugging while testing, It's easy to bend and misalign pins. SATA is much more robust. I therefore use an IDE to SATA cable and use Hitachi 40Gb SATA HD drives. I have tried an SSD drive, but so far without luck. To copy your existing hard drive to a new disk see the instructions below.

Software

Disk Images

• Boot to CG8
• Boot to Console
• Experimental

Diagnostics

Before doing any work on the CG-8 you should back up and clone the internal hard drive. It is strongly recommended that you don't do any diagnostic work with your original hard drive in place.