half-dead pismo, need some assistance

Let it sit plugged in for a day or two. You might even try that with the old mobo.

When you hit the power key no sound eminates from either the on-board speakers or through the headphone jack...

from what i understand the old mobo was working up until the day it stopped, so I'm not sure that would have helped. I had already left it plugged in for a day before i swapped it out. I'm thinking there might be a problem with the sound/plug board. I'll try letting it sit in the mean time...

alright, it's been a little over 48 hours and nothing has changed. The only response to the power key is the keyboard (no screen, no hd, no speakers). Any more suggestions, or should i start looking for more service parts?

Ok, take everything out of the case and lay it out on a table or summit. Attach a keyboard and trackpad or mouse to it and an external monitor. Power the board and see what happens. If it works, start adding other items such as the screen.

Turns out the CPU card wasn't properly seated. Anyway, now it boots but I can't get it to load an OS. When I put in a Jaguar DVD it kernel panics, and it won't read any of the System CDs I have either. I booted it into Firewire disk mode and loaded 9.2.2 onto it, but it won't boot off of that now either, it gets an "address error" and tells me to boot with extensions off, but when I do it still doesn't boot correctly.

I know the drives that shipped with these are known to be flaky but does this sound like something more? I don't want to spend the money on a new drive if there's still another underlying problem.

I have had problems with 10.2.4 and newer on my Wallstreet. Whenever I have to install, I have to use the 10.2 (.nothing) release CD and have to hold C to get it to boot that way.

Well it won't boot off of any CD (OS 9, etc.). As it turns out this is what it was doing for the previous owner too, so the motherboard swap did not fix the problem. It wouldn't boot off of the installed OS for him even though it had previously been working. He was told that either the motherboard or the processor card was the problem.

I have posted several want-ads for a processor card, but before I spend the money I want to know if this is even a reasonable diagnosis. Everything else seems to funcion, it just refuses to boot anything.

n/t

that was it. can't believe that didn't occur to me. Thanks a ton.

I used to work as a Mac tech for a living, and I did PowerBooks pretty much exclusively for about a year. I developed a "sense" for these things. Let me know if you have any other questions.

yeah, ironically i just finished the training for apple portables and i've been doing this for the last 3 years or so. in any case, thanks again.

For future reference, Macs are the most RAM-picky computers I have ever seen. If anything at all is wrong with the ram, it will either refuse to work or work very well and crash horribly in the middle of a big project.

RS/6000's are worse. Mine requires oddball parity RAM. ???

Although, it IS still a PowerPC processor...

Try a Mac IIfx on for size.

IIRC, they use 60-pin SIMMs. AFAIK, those were made specifically and especially for that machine.