Aftermarket Radio Issue.

[mrcaddy]

So, last night I finally got the courage up to try my luck at putting a CD player in my '94 Coupe. Not hard for most folks, I know. I had this radio for a few years. It was in another car of mine. It is a Wal Mart $100 Pioneer. It was carefully packaged up and sitting a shelf in the garage. I went through the process of installing the mounting kit. never done that before, felt pretty good about it. Then installed the aftermarket wiring harness. When I turned it on, nothing.
I checked the fuse at the back of the radio and it was ok. I can see that I have power to the radio. I put the factory one in and it's working fine. What did I miss? It should be sufficient to ground the stereo through the factory radio wiring harness, right? Is it possible that a radio that was only used for a year and put on the shelf could go bad?

[sunrunner_pei]

Personally I never ground through the harness, I just ran the stereo ground wire directly to chassis. I would double-check the 12V+ constant, 12V+ switched and grounds with a multimeter. Do this on the stereo side of the wiring harness. It should tell you that you wired the deck correctly to the harness.

[dajuiceman]

since the deck has been sitting theres a small possibility that it could have gone bad. Take your constant and acc from the head unit and put them on the positive side of the battery and take your ground and put it on the negative side. It should come on, if it doesnt then the h.u. is probably shot (assuming the fuses or fuse links are good).