Mystery of the comatose Yosemite

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doug-doug the mighty's picture
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Mystery of the comatose Yosemite

Just scored 3 Yosemites from someone on the NewtonTalk list.

The one that was believed to be a working machine has a quirk and I am looking for a clue. Hooked up power and a monitor and a USB keyboard. Machine chimes okay on boot up and nothing happens. DVD drive will open and close okay, but nothing else - no monitor output at all. Tried with a monitor (AC) plugged into the Mac as well as into the wall.

(Yes, monitor works otherwise)

Opened case and hit both (one at a time) buttons in the lower left corner - no change.

What can I do to get this apparently good machine to give me the time of day (so to speak)?

TIA
--DDTM

PS - as for the other two, have not tried, but plan to get all up and running if I can.

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'til you're blue and white in the face

Ah, the good old B&W that chimes and doesn't do anything. Them's were the days. Never again, he said.

Do you have it all stripped down? Only one stick of RAM, video card, and nothing else? Also remove the firewire module, especially the firewire module. Everything is jumpered correctly? The two buttons in the corner--the one closer to the battery is the CUDA which is only supposed to be hit once, and only once, between attempts, or maybe once and only once, period. The other button is simply a power on/off button. You can just leave the case open and hit that button to turn it on in your attempts to boot, but close the case soon unless you've installed a fan on the ZIF's heatsink. What kind of ZIF does it have? 300mhz, 350, 400? A Beige G3 266mhz? That one wouldn't work at all. Does it have a G4 ZIF? The Yosemite motherboard firmware must have a software patch installed first before installing a G4 ZIF to get past Apple's diabolical G4 block.

Disconnect the hard drive and CD drive cables as well. You're just trying to get a video signal. It's got a Rage 128 video card probably. Have you tried a different card? And a fresh battery? Try different sticks of RAM. The B&W is particular about RAM, PC100 and PC133. Move the one stick of RAM to different slots between attempts. An ADB keyboard instead of a USB might be better. You can try booting without the battery. Also remove the battery, hit the CUDA button once, and only once, and after a couple minutes, put the battery back in and then try a boot by pushing the on/off button next to the CUDA. No video yet? Have you tried enough now? Are you feeling better?

If still no signal, hook the hard drive with a system back up to the motherboard, but the rest still stripped--including, and especially, the firewire module--and let it sit overnight and try it again in the morning.

In my experience, I'd say about 7 times out of 10 it will start right up the next morning as if nothing had ever been wrong and it's looking at your disbelief and saying to you, "what?"

Be suspicious of that firewire module...

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local availabilty of fresh, live chickens...

hmmm... this is a lot to think about.

Yes, it is stripped down. It was known to work but now you have me worried about the firewire module.

I do not know the processor speed - not a freakin' clue. There is a huge heatsink over the CPU, which seems to be something that came from Apple. My inclination is that this is a stock G3 something-or-other.

[minor digression]
Meet up with astro_rob tonight to drop of a nice cache of old Macs (mostly IIcx, IIsi, LC, LC III, Mac Plus, and that ever so rare Quadra 700) and I bounced this off of him as well. The first thing he mentioned was the Pram battery, which brings me to your other point...
[/minor digression]

I pulled the PRAM battery and it was deader than the economy - if you can buy that one.

Before I start pulling things apart (and I have been known to completely gut a machine just to capture a dust-bunny when a can of compressed air will do...) my plan now is to first, replace the battery. But I will do so as part of a special ritual involving my burying a lima bean in the fork of a road where a dead frog is eaten by a wayward crow as an old gypsy woman strokes her wart on her nose and chants as I dance in a circle three times and wave a recently strangled chicken over my head...

...depending on the local availabilty of fresh, live chickens, of course. Wink

If this fails, then I will take it to the next step.

Biggrin

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Huge heatsink?

Stock heatsinks on the B&W were never what would be called huge. They were silver with one side cut shorter so the door could close without the heatsink hitting the Zip drive cage. If it's purple then it's a Sonnet upgrade. I'm guessing maybe you really lucked-out and got a 900mhz G3 Powerlogix (actually can't remember exactly who made that one) processor on there. On the Apple ZIF there'll be a sticker on one of the two cache chips on the ZIF board that'll have a number which will end with 300, or 350, or 400--the ZIF speed. You can usually see it without having to take off the heatsink.

If the heatsink covers the cache, then you've most likely got a third party ZIF on there. All Apple ZIF heatsinks did not use thermal paste, so that would be a first easy clue that the heatsink isn't Apple. If it's Apple, then you can just take the heatsink off anytime and check on the ZIF. You don't have to reapply paste and all that, unless the previous owner for some reason scraped off the black thermal square on the bottom of the Apple heatsink. To take off a ZIF heatsink I use a phillips screwdriver to push down on the clip while I use a small slotted screwdriver to get under the clip and pop it off. When replacing the heatsink, you should take some care to lay the heatsink flat, apply the clip, and try to keep the heatsink flat on the ZIF as you push down on the clip to snap it back on.

The other thing about ZIF's is they must be matched with a jumper stick on the motherboard. It's blue or white and right below the ZIF. Go here for more info:
http://drivejumper.com/ClockupG3/b&wclockup.html
It's possible the previous owner put on a third party ZIF but didn't correct the jumpers. You might take the ZIF off one of the other Yosemites and put it on that motherboard along with its jumper block. There's a little tab at the end of the jumper block to help remember which way is up.

Yep, it could be the PRAM battery. I always keep a couple of spare around. They usually end up in a Mac pretty fast since I pick up used Macs often. I buy the 3.6v batteries cheap off eBay from a seller named ronaldo101. He's never disappointed me.

I'll not hang the firewire module entirely, but keep it off until you can get that machine running and stabilized.

You got a dance for winning the lottery you can teach us? There's some roosters who hang out in the parking lot of my daughter's school. I could go do some rustling.

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Re: Huge heatsink?

Stock heatsinks on the B&W were never what would be called huge. They were silver with one side cut shorter so the door could close without the heatsink hitting the Zip drive cage.

Then this is what I have - just looked big...
On the Apple ZIF there'll be a sticker on one of the two cache chips on the ZIF board that'll have a number which will end with 300, or 350, or 400--the ZIF speed. You can usually see it without having to take off the heatsink.

...and it looks like a 350.
I buy the 3.6v batteries cheap off eBay from a seller named ronaldo101. He's never disappointed me.

I will have to look remember that name.
You got a dance for winning the lottery you can teach us? There's some roosters who hang out in the parking lot of my daughter's school. I could go do some rustling.

Yes, but it does not require poultry - only manatees (its a Florida thing). It was successful in letting me win the Georgia Powerball once - no lie. Problem is that is the ONLY number I got was the powerball and the payout was $2 - but it did work.

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stripped

New battery and no success.

Do you have it all stripped down? Only one stick of RAM, video card, and nothing else? Also remove the firewire module, especially the firewire module.

This did the trick.

Not sure the offending component, but I will start adding things and see what where it dies.

Current config has me using an ADB keyboard/mouse in addition to what is described above.

Will post back with what I find.

Thanks!

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booted up

booted up - it has 9.2.1 installed but I had to go with all extensions off in order to stop it from hanging on bootup.

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To X or not to X?

save me some trouble... I can install up to X.4.11.

I am of the firm belief that every Mac has a 'sweet-spot OS' where even though it CAN run a certain OS, it works better with a different one. In most cases, it is a higher OS, but some times not. Like my Bondi iMac seemed happiest on 8.5.1... but I digress...

What is the best OS for this machine?

I *want* X.4.11, but I do not want to install a headache since I will be shipping out soon and not able to fix it and the intended user is a teen who needs to do school work (including web-based homework/research).

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Re: To X or not to X?

save me some trouble... I can install up to X.4.11.

I am of the firm belief that every Mac has a 'sweet-spot OS' where even though it CAN run a certain OS, it works better with a different one. In most cases, it is a higher OS, but some times not. Like my Bondi iMac seemed happiest on 8.5.1... but I digress...

What is the best OS for this machine?

I *want* X.4.11, but I do not want to install a headache since I will be shipping out soon and not able to fix it and the intended user is a teen who needs to do school work (including web-based homework/research).

I was running Tiger on my B&W and it worked fine. A little sluggish, but no worse then any other OS X version.

Just as an aside, I noticed you were asking for an AGP video card in the sale/trade forum. Just to clarify in case you're still not clear, the B&W uses *PCI* video cards only. (The short 32 bit slot connector in the B&W runs at an oddball 66Mhz instead of 33Mhz like the longer 64 bit slots, but it *is* just PCI.)

--Peace

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32?

...ah...
I see it now. I just did not look too close. Thought it was odd that AGP could not take an ADC card. This was my first time inside one of these.

BTW - I added to the post that I no longer needed said card.

I may try X, but I want to get the machine stable first.

I am having some freezing problems right now. I will describe it better in a seperate post.

thanks.

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freezing

Just zeroed the drive out and installed a fresh version of 9.2.1.

Machine is occassionally freezing for no obvious reason and is hanging on boot up (even with 9.2.1 base set) unless booted with extensions off, at which point it freezes a few minutes later.

Still have no extra hardware added back in (

especially the firewire module.
).

Any ideas?

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Re: 32?

BTW - I added to the post that I no longer needed said card.

Yeah, I saw. Just figured I'd clarify just in case you were in a scrounging mood anyway.

For freezing problems my first suspect would be bad RAM. B&Ws in my experience are *horribly* picky.

--Peace

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Yep, go with RAM first. Those

Yep, go with RAM first. Those were also the symptoms I encountered with bad firewire modules, or at least that was what I reasoned since when I removed the module it would stop freezing, but with the B&W, you never really know for sure. It can be a very temperamental motherboard.

It doesn't have AGP, but one thing that's nice about the B&W is that the PCI slot that's reserved for the video card is a 66mhz PCI slot, as opposed to the usual 33mhz slots. I don't remember if Apple ever used 66mhz slots again.

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glad you got it working. Thes

glad you got it working. These are great machines. I have one, and I was surpriesed people were saying it's the PRAM battery, since I was using mine just fine without one.

strange the RAM did not throw an error and make it beep. Usually it will. These machines are not very picky about that. I have 4x256mb in mine, and all sticks are different, including a stick of the elusive REDRAM. (stupid The Shining reference there.)

10.4.11 worked a treat on mine for years. I was running an install for almost 2 years before I reformatted.

-digital Wink

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Re: glad you got it working. Thes

strange the RAM did not throw an error and make it beep. Usually it will. These machines are not very picky about that. I have 4x256mb in mine, and all sticks are different, including a stick of the elusive REDRAM. (stupid The Shining reference there.)

My B&W corrupted its hard drive after putting in some DIMMs which passed the fingers-and-toes beep test, so don't put any faith in that.

--Peace

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tempermental

wow. this thing is moody!

I keep having freezing issues and have swapped memory around - I have three sticks that came with the machine, all 128MB. one-by-one I am trying them out. the one stick that does the best is in right now, in the top slot.

I am having a horrible problem with OpenTransport. I have TCP/IP set to Ethernet as well as AppleTalk and the ethernet is plugged into my router in hopes of pulling stuff from Connie. my test of connectivity is to first use Date/Time to set the clock from the default internet Apple time server. doing this causes the app to quit with an error message (gripes about OT) and/or freezing, and/or suddenly turning off the monitor (goes black and green light turns yellow as if sleeping).

this last event resulted in an error message reading "Sorry, a system error occurred. ATI Graphics Accelerator error type 11 blah-blah-blah turn off extensions and reboot"

so I will and will post more later.

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somewhere

okay, i have a stripped set of extensions and added in enough that this thing can set time via network and connect to Connie on my router.

next plan: upgrade to 9.2.2 and add my applications to the hard drive (but not to the Applications folder) and copy over nedded prefs and extensions for some of these apps (again, in an isolated folder). having these things semi-loaded makes it easier to 'turn them on in later steps' and will be a good test of wether or not this thing is going to freeze up on my in the current config.

after first batch is added, I will restore the firewire module and see if it holds up moving the next batch of files.

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progress

added firewire module and restarted - booted okay.

created extension set #2 = re-enabled extensions to support firewire, DVD, disc burning, and some USB stuff. no printing-related extensions turned on. restarted - booted okay.

USB drives now mounting fine. no firewire devices on hand to validate connection.

created extension set #2+ATI = enabled all ATI extensions. restarted - got error type 11 on the ATI Graphics Accelerator.

dropped back to previous extension set (#2). restarted - booted okay

used Software Update to update: OS to 9.2.2; AppleScript to 1.8.3; and iPod software to 1.3. error occurred during installation. restarted and viewed log - no information about 9.2.2 but some looking around verified that AppleScript and iPod did not install. 9.2.2 folder was left on desktop. reran upgrade from this folder. upgrade ran fine. restarted - booted okay. copied 9.2.2 update folder to Connie via network (will keep for future use).

reran Software Update to update: AppleScript to 1.8.3; CarbonLib to 1.6; Authoring Support to 1.1.6; iPod Software to 1.3. restarted - booted okay.

added SCSI card and restarted - booted okay.

installed SCSI Probe5 from Connie - system sees SCSI card okay.

ran System Profiler - confirms firewire and SCSI hardware on 9.2.2.

calling it a night for now. more to do later. seems the ATI stuff will be a headache but want to get the other stuff first - maybe 9.2.2 update fixed this - will try in morning.

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Get OS 9 off of there - go straight to OS X

I may try X, but I want to get the machine stable first.

Doug, I really think this sums up the problem here. Making the machine stable isn't something you should do before installing OS X; rather, installing OS X is the way to make this machine stable. It's also the way to minimize the chances of something going wrong after you ship out.

So my advice would be to stop trying to get OS9 to work - especially with the notoriously flaky ATI drivers, which seem to be the main problem - and go straight to installing OS X.

Also, as a side benefit, OS X tends to be pickier than OS 9 about RAM. So installing OS X will probably help eliminate all these questions about whether or not the RAM is the problem - if any of your RAM is at all marginal, OS X won't run stably. And if OS X runs stably, then you can be 99% sure your RAM is fine.

The B&Ws support Tiger right out of the box. I've installed it (updated to 10.4.11) on many of them, and they're super-stable with it, and while they're not speed demons, their speed with 10.4.11 is very respectable as long as you have at least 384MB or 512MB of RAM in them.

Best,
Matt

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ATI

Oh, that ATI Graphic Accelerator problem, I remember that one, but how I solved it escapes my memory. A software conflict, I believe. I think maybe even though the newer Accelerator is installed in extensions, the older version may still be there too, so you can go in and delete the older version. The same thing goes with the Applescript. The older Applescript is usually still hanging out in extensions too. Do a select, Get Info to figure out which is newer. Which video card do you have? Most came with the 16mb ATI Rage 128, but some came with the older Rage Pro Xclaim VR video card that has AV ports.

Personally, if you've got Panther install disks, I'd just stay with Panther with that machine. It hums in Panther. Tiger is G4 primed.

I've owned around six B&W's at different times, and I found all of them temperamental, but a sampling of six is not necessarily indicative of the whole run of...how many?...hundreds of thousands produced, and I've heard others like iamdigitalman claim smooth sailing on the B&W, so maybe it's all a bit of the luck of the draw. My experience is, yes you can use a set of different SDRAM sticks of different persuasions, but it takes a lot of patience to get the set stabilized, usually needing to put them in one at a time and sometimes rearranging them, but once the setup becomes stable, it stays stable, until you add something new or different, and then the stable deck of cards comes falling down. I've got one B&W left running 9.2.2 which I keep mostly for my daughter to play around with using an ADB drawing tablet and stuff like that. It's got a Sonnet 500mhz G4, four sticks of 256mb matching RAM, an Adaptec 29160n SCSI card and Seagate 10k SCSI drive, and a flashed Radeon 64mb 7000 video card. It's a very nice setup and runs smooth in both 9 and Panther. The nice thing about the B&W is it does SCSI very well, and another nice thing is it's pretty simple to mod a ATX PSU to put it in the B&W, which at this age, you might want to consider if you're planning to hang onto them.

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almost there

installed Stuffit 7.0.3. installed QuickTime 6.5. restarted - booted okay.

installed apps and extensions to support scanner and some other only runs-in-9-utilities. created extension set #3 to accomodate these. this step was critical for me and why I went through all of this rather than just going right into OS X. restarted - booted okay.

added Serial interface card (needed to support my printer). restarted - booted okay.

created extension set #4 = turned on minor extensions: speech, quicktime, etc. restarted - booted okay.

restored other two memory modules. had to reset the CUDA in order to restarted - only got grey screen, no mouse, nothing. retried it OpenFirmware keys - no change. removed one memory module. reset CUDA. restarted - booted okay.

too much on drive - need to drop in a 6G drive to hold OS X or free room somewhere.

seems i know which memory module 9 does not like and it looks like X will go on okay after i add the extra drive.

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Re: almost there

too much on drive - need to drop in a 6G drive to hold OS X or free room somewhere.

seems i know which memory module 9 does not like and it looks like X will go on okay after i add the extra drive.

Read the section "Revised IDE Controller Chip" on this page and make sure your B&W is a "Rev. 2" motherboard before adding a slave drive. If it's a Rev 1 the conventional wisdom is you'd be better off transferring the whole shooting match to a single larger drive.

--Peace

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yes - rev 2

cool tip - thanks!

yes, i do see a 402 and so the board will behave for the drive.

since the donor drive is the 8G from Connie, i have my work cut out for me. if it gives me too much grief, i may have to go dig out Columbus (my Bondi iMac) and pull the 120G from there. not my top choice since this was a static archive of stuff and has no better home for now.

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null

null post - please ignore.

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