STe Will Not Boot From Cold.

[Thee]

... the signal to the monitor is resetting. Time to get the screwdriver out again.

[Thee]

I have tried re-seating all possible chips and cleaning RAM and the reset switch reads fine... I even dug out my old SM144 to be sure that it was not the VGA adapter. I am at a bit of a loss, although I did find a thread on Atari-Forum where someone had the same issue and it turned out to be the 74LS86 chip in the modulator, so I guess this will be my next step.

[Thee]

... I should add that the actual jack on the modulator was missing when I first bought this machine although it has never seemed to be an issue for all these years.

[exxos]

I'm confused if you actually have a reset issue or a monitor issue...

If you put a game floppy in, does the floppy drive show activity of loading the game ? In that case you have a reset issue...

If you do have activity loading, then you have a monitor issue..

I think you need to sort this out before trying to diagnose issues you may or may not have...

[Thee]

What my initial problem was - that from a cold boot, there would be no activity upon the monitor besides the ''Out of Range'' message of the LED screen suggesting there was a signal going to the monitor otherwise I would have had a ''Check Signal Cable'' message. If I then pressed the reset button it would boot as normal displaying the boot screen.
After replacing the cap's it did then boot from cold... the RAM, etc was fine and I ran some programmes without any issues. What I mean by ''Boot'' is that there was a display upon the monitor as usual
I switched off, left it off for a few hours and then booted from cold - now it will not display anything besides the ''Out of Range'' message, even if I use the reset.
I did try my Atari Hi Res monitor thinking that it may be a monitor issue, but that is just blank as well.

I do not have a FDD attached although the Gotek displays correct, power light is on and the PS/2 optical mouse is also receiving power, just nothing on the screen.

[Thee]

... if I press the reset button, the ''Out of Range'' message momentarily disappears and then returns, which I take to mean that the reset is working.

[exxos]

This could also mean though you have problems with the ROM.. .The video is setup very early in ROM access so you appear to be getting that far... STE's do suffer with bad ROM sockets so that may well be a issue you could be having.

[Thee]

The original TOS was 1.06 and soldered to the board. When I updated to 2.06 a fair few years ago, I first soldered in sockets just in case I wanted to use an earlier OS again. I did try the old 1.06 chips earlier - but, it made no difference. I will have a close look at my soldering on the sockets that I installed.

[Thee]

Yes!! That was it. I had a close look at the sockets and they appeared fine, but I still gave the pads a re-flow and added a bit more solder to some of them.
It is now booting properly from cold.

Thank you very much, very much appreciated.

[exxos]