Alright, a friend gave me an old PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet 266) a few weeks ago, i was saving my money for an older ibook G3 500... something im more familiar with, but this was too cool to pass up. it had been sitting in a fileing cabinet of his for several years, the battery was gone but it fired right up. it only had 64 mb of ram and the 2gb hard drive it came with. i followed the steps word for word on ifixit.com and proceeded to install 128mb of ram and a 12gb hard drive. everything seemed to go well and i put it all back together, i know the hard drive is unformatted (and i have installed other hard drives on other macs before, but since this one is so old i cant run firewire to it via my ibook to inspect it)... well heres the problem, when i plugged in the power it proceeded to boot up, with the apple sound... then after that its just blinking and sounds like its trying to boot, well i thought no biggie i'll just eject the cd and reboot with OS X and go from there, but now the cd wont eject... so i replaced the hard drive with the old one and still no dice. im now going to remove the ram and try from there. please any advice will be much appreciated i dont know much of anything about these old macs... i mean i did just fine with my G4 Gigabit ethernet 400mhz but this is just so anchient i guess im just not that great. please just tell me any advice you can... i need it!
-thanx, Don.
now i removed the 128 ram, returned the computer to its original state. and still the cd drive does not open, the sleep light blinked for about a minute now its no longer blinking and i think i killed it. i wanted to upgrade it just enough so that i could have word installed and be wireless so i could take it with me to class. i wish someone knew what to do that wouldnt cost me a lot of money.
Try this. hold down the control, option shift keys down at the same time and the power on off switch then release them. This will reset the computer. If the battery is good you should be able to push the power switch and get the chime and it should power up. If the battery is bad use the Ac Adaptor when you do the reset. Also check the ram you used. Some is not compatable even though it will fit right in memory slot
thanks for the reply, i tried that and this is the result after several attempts.
1. i try those keys and nothing happens so i keep trying then after about the 6-7th time it restarts.
2. once restarted it makes the apple sound then blinks the sleep led and the screen remains blank. no sound after this comes from the machine, no sound of a hard drive or cd rom drive or anything.
3. a few days ago i had to restart the computer before i had done anything to it besides installing OS X and after the restart the apple smilie popped up with a question mark in the center, what brought this about i have no idea, but it should have been a sign to me that something was going bad, but i didnt think anything of it and my new hard drive and ram were on their way. at that point i reinstalled os x.
4. im completely clueless now. something serious is the culprit or its something very simple. but for the screen not to even light up, it to not read the hard drive.. i just have no idea.
maybe the cd drive just died
actually the cd drive started to work for one brief second then when i tried to boot the old ram/hard drive off the osx.. then the screen went black and the cd rom no longer spun and it looked like everything just froze-the sleep light started to blink again. im thinking its something along the lines of power, like PSU or power and charge card or the internal battery.