[rescue] Re: rescue Digest, Vol 16, Issue 20

[Ross Bernheim]

On Tuesday, March 9, 2004, at 06:29 PM, rescue-request at sunhelp.org 
wrote:

> In its intended-to-be-temporary spot, the G3 wasn't on a surge
> suppressor.  Sunday night, we had a thunderstorm.  Now the G3 won't
> boot.

Ouch.

> It powers on; it gets a normal-sounding boot chime; the hard drive 
> spins
> up; and that's it.  No video, no further disk activity audible.  The
> monitor appears to be functional but not syncing to anything, and the
> only other Mac monitor I have to connect to it doesn't seem to be
> working at all, so I can't see if I'm getting a sad-mac (though the
> normal-sounding chime seems to suggest otherwise).  I tried swapping 
> the
> original PPC604e/180 back into it in place of the Sonnet G3 card, with
> no effect.

Sounds like the surge took out some info on the hard drive. The normal
chimes means that it got through its diagnostics. That the hard drive 
spins
up indicates that the boot got to that point. The lack of disk activity 
would
indicate that there is a problem with getting information from the 
disk. It
might be a simple corruption problem or blown disk.

Try booting from a Mac OS CD. If it boots from the CD, you should be 
able
to see the hard drive. If you can read from the hard drive, then it is 
a corrupted
OS on the hard drive and you can reinstall the OS. If you cannot read 
the hard
drive, it may be a corrupted directory and might well be recoverable 
with Alsoft's
Disk Warrior program. Or you can reformat and reinstall all the 
software.

If the drive is dead, a standard SCSI drive should work in the 7600.
I have been using my 7600/132 at work for the last few months. It is a
startup and I needed a computer and the 7200/90 I first tried was just
too slow to do the web browsing that I needed to do. The 7600 is a
good bit faster but still slow, but handles everything else with ease.

> So:  Any speculations on what's dead?  Blown video?  Dead motherboard?
> Zapped ROM?  I'm assuming either of the latter would preclude the 
> chime.

Yes, you assume correctly.


Ross Bernheim