Indeed, the threat of faulty caps having been used on the motherboard just stinks, and is SO unlike what I've come to expect from Teac Pro. The good news is, some progress was had yesterday - with NO help from the firm, by dint of necessity.
The motherboard is located on the bottom (naturally!), adjacent to all the USB, serial, IE1394, keyboard, mouse, LAN, etc. ports. To gain access to the battery, I removed the A/D/A converter board without disturbing any of the IDE cables. The battery is held by a spring-loaded retaining clip; a little squeeze and out she pops.
With a new 2032 installed, the unit sprang to life - and running the boot disc seemed to put me in the final stretch home.....BUT it won't format the drive. I notice that during the DOS scroll the "0" slot is recognized as "Tascam", and the "1" slot vacant. A message appears about a drive not recognized ("check cable", they say!). I think the main drive IS there, but the BIOS configuration was lost with the battery failure.
Opening the BIOS (not possible until the battery was replaced), I see two default configs, but neither has yielded a successful boot and reload of the OS from the DVD. The disc drive is working fine, and the contents of the system disc DO boot WinXPpro (again, never ran at all until battery replacement).
So, off we go to a friend's computer repair shop today to screw around with the BIOS, since no one at Tascam is willing to discuss the correct config procedure. On the off chance that the IDE drive cable bounced loose (HIGHLY unlikely), we'll check that also. If you have a clue how to bring this home, please share!
Hellvis