PowerMac 7300 and Sonnet G4 upgrade card boot problem

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PowerMac 7300 and Sonnet G4 upgrade card boot problem

I have a PM 7300 with 512MB and a Sonnet Crescendo G4 400 card. Upon a cold boot I get a half chime and a long delay (maybe 1 or 2 minutes) before it boots. But if I do a soft boot or turn off, then back on I get a full chime and it boots fine! Actually if I turn off and wait a while and try turning on it works fine. So this leads me to believe a component needs to warm up for it to work? Anyone know what could cause this? I do not have a cache card installed, just the four 128MB sticks and a 32MB video card.

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RAM?

I'd probably suspect the RAM first. Is it all matching RAM? Do you know the specs on the RAM? You can go here to find most:

http://www.chipmunk.nl/DRAM/ChipManufacturers.htm

Techtool 3 is usually pretty good at finding hardware problems.

How's the PRAM battery?

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Had a very similar problem wi

Had a very similar problem with my (retired) 9600/XLR8 G3 500.
Never did figure it out.

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Probably not going to help..

Probably not going to help.. but my q950 takes a huge amount of time to boot when the ram test is enabled (max ram installed). Don't know if there is something similar for PPC macs.

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Disabling the RAM test

You can disable the Classic RAM hardware test that delays booting by pushing the Command and Option keys while you open the Memory Control Panel. An extra radio button selection will appear at the bottom of the control panel window which will allow you to turn the test off. That works in OS8.5 through 9.2.2. I've never tried it in OS X. A lot of RAM in a legacy machine will definitely make a long delay at startup, especially if they're 128mb sticks. The half chime is the part that makes me think there might be more to it than that, but it might be no more than that. You should check the specs on the RAM though. There are a lot of weird 128mb DRAM sticks out there. I've got a couple that have 3.3v chips on them. They were screwing up my machines pretty bad when they were mixed with the regular 5v sticks. Alone they work ok.

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