Pismo experts I need your help. I purchased a Pismo this week and it has no video. I get a nice chime when I push the power button and a little hard drive activity. Not a lot though. It sounds like there is some activity and than stops. The same for booting with the cd drive.
I have reseated the ram and the cables on the logic board. I can't get it to zapp the pram (probably because it isn't going through the full boot process).
I have unplugged the pram battery for ten minutes, tried the reset button on the back...nothing has worked.
When I first got it I couldn't even get the boot chime until I fiddled with the reset button, power button, removing the battery etc. and than I finally got a chime. This is why I am hoping it is something simple from being stored or something and not a bad logic board.
Any ideas?
you might try plugging it in and let it sit for a while and see if that helps. It might be a bad logic board or bad memory though...
You could also try disconnecting the HD, removing the CD drive, and removing the battery, starting it up and let it sit turned on for 5 or 10 minutes.
Have you tried connecting it to an external monitor? If you have a usb keyboard and mouse handy, hook those up along with the monitor, power it on, and close the lid. This will put it in clamshell mode. I had a pismo with an almost identical failure mode. Turned out the logic board's internal lvds controller was shot (didn't find this out until after replacing the lvds cable and trying a known good lcd.
Now, when you say no video, is there presence of backlight (i.e. grey screen)? Or is it a case of no backlight and no video. If there's no backlight, use a flashlight to see if there is video on the lcd. (could be as simple as a bad backlight or inverter board).
Hope this helps.
I just tried my VGA studio display and it shows the same thing...no video, no backlight, nothing...all black.
So I guess that means the logic board is bad? Especially since it isn't finishing the boot process and I can't zapp the pram.
Based on this, I'd say that it sounds like you've got a bad logic board. If you can get your hands on a known good cpu card for a pismo, I'd try that before spending money on a logic board, but the logic board is where I would go next.
Ok. Thanks. I will try the cpu and logic board as advised.