When a DigiCart will not boot up (flashing cursor in the display), it is very common that the problem is a low memory battery voltage. Instruct them to remove the CPU board, and remove the silver lithium cell (about the size of a quarter) and reinstall the board after waiting a minute or so. Upon power up the unit should display “BATTERY BACKUP ERROR – PRESS ANY KEY” and then complete initialization.
The unit can operate in this state, it will not remember setup parameters but recording, preset and stack programming are unaffected as they are saved to disk.