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Powerbook 3400c barely booting

Submitted by iamdigitalman on February 22, 2008 - 12:20am. PowerPC Macs

Hey guys. I got this in a conquest today. It is a very nice machine. It has 2 batteries, an external charger, the original restore CD and disk tools floppy disk, the VGA adapter, and the phone cable (has a flag wrapped on it that mentions the 3400). However, it does not seem to want to boot anything. It had Mac OS 9.1 on the 6gb HD it had in it, but would crash at launch, mentioning an unimplemented trap. I managed to get it to boot once, pressing shift, and I found out it's a 200mhz model with 48mb of RAM.

However, after that one boot, I got nothing. I popped in the restore CD, my Mac OS 9 CD, and my 8.6, and pressed C. All won't boot. the LED will light up for a second, and go out, and it will boot from the HD.

After that, the hard drive started thrashing, and it died. So I put in a 4gb that came with it. It works, and there is nothing on it. Again, I got nothing booting from CD. I tried resetting PRAM by hitting the button, nothing. I then swapped in the floppy module. I put in the disk tools floppy. Oddly, the Mac OS splash is in black and white. It gets as far as showing a wallpaper, and the menubar with nothing in it before giving up.

anyone have any idea on how to get it running? it is a nice machine I hate to see go to waste.

-digital Eye-wink

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Reset?

Submitted by william ahearn on February 22, 2008 - 12:46am.

Hey,

Try resetting the power manager. Look here:

http://www.jacsoft.co.nz/Tech_Notes/PP_Manage.shtml#faq7

William
www.williamahearn.com

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Alright, I did that, BUT now

Submitted by iamdigitalman on February 22, 2008 - 12:43pm.

Alright, I did that, BUT now the trackpad is not working, in addition to the mouse I plugged in. I tried checking the connection. The keyboard works, and it is booting all the way to the floppy now. The keyboard works, and I can navigate around like that.

what now?

-digital Eye-wink

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gobabushka's picture

id try resetting the power ma

Submitted by gobabushka on February 22, 2008 - 1:36pm.

id try resetting the power manager again, leave it plugged in for a bit, and also reset the pram while ur at it, cause it sounds like the pram battery is shot.

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iamdigitalman's picture

my guess is that it is dead,

Submitted by iamdigitalman on February 22, 2008 - 9:41pm.

my guess is that it is dead, considering the age of the machine. Should I leave it unplugged or would that no do harm? and if I leave it plugged in, should I put a battery in it or not?

-digital Eye-wink

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partial death

Submitted by tachyon on February 23, 2008 - 4:05am.

I would say that the CD-ROM drive is kaput. That may be why you can't boot from it.
However in order to test this you would have to boot up the 3400 from a known-good drive, such as an external SCSI drive, then put a CD-ROM in and read data from it.
So while we are talking external SCSI, you could also attach an external CD-ROM drive to it and boot from that to try installing.
If you do that, remember to try Command-Shift-Option-Delete instead of C at startup to force it to ignore the internal HD.
Are you sure you've got retail OS 9 and 8.6? The ones that shipped with certain models only boot those models. The retail ones worked on anything that was around at the time.

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I will have to dig out my SCS

Submitted by iamdigitalman on February 23, 2008 - 2:11pm.

I will have to dig out my SCSI adapter for powerbooks. I did get an apple branded SCSI CD-ROM, the kind that takes the cartridge. If that does not work, I guess I could try putting the HD in my 1400 and install 7.6.1 on there and then put the HD back in the 3400. I wonder if that would work.

-digital Eye-wink

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It should, if . . .

Submitted by william ahearn on February 23, 2008 - 3:18pm.

Hey,

When you install 7.6.1 on the 1400, select "for any Macintosh" and not "for this Macintosh" or powerbook or whatever. Or "basic install." That way you'll get a system that will work on the 3400. After that, you can install whatever is missing but what might be missing won't stop you from using the powerbook.

William
www.williamahearn.com

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I just had a thought

Submitted by iamdigitalman on February 23, 2008 - 3:45pm.

on the 7.6.1 CD, there is a folder of floppy disk images, one folder in there has the actual system images. Since the floppy drive appears to be working, I could just use that.

But my major concern now is the trackpad, or any pointing device is not working for some reason. I plugged in a mouse to the ADB port, no response. I also pulled up the palm rest, and checked the trackpad connection. Does this have anything to do with the power manager? because it was working before I tried resetting it. How do I get it working again?

-digital Eye-wink

» iamdigitalman's Cleaning House Sale

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That's weird . . .

Submitted by william ahearn on February 23, 2008 - 4:09pm.

Hey,

You said:
"But my major concern now is the trackpad, or any pointing device is not working for some reason."

It has nothing to do with the power manager that I can figure. Don't suppose you can trash the finder prefs with no pointing device. Does the mouse work with a boot disk?

William
www.williamahearn.com

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