Well I just got a pismo off of ebay and of course it was *possibly not working*
So I put a power adapter on it and it would not boot at all, but I had read a topic on here that talked about disconnecting the pram battery and reseting the system. This allowed the system to actually start, I get a startup tone but then it just goes to a grey screen.
I have been able to go into openfirmware, but even if I type "mac-boot" it just goes back to the grey screen of nothing.
I have also tried when booting the system to press the 'option' key which brings up a screen with two icons on it, they looked like a right arrow and a restart kinda symbol, and the system just sits there with a watch like it is waiting to do somthing, the trackpad does move at this time but if i click either of the icons it does nothing.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Ok i actually got somewhere here, just for kicks i threw in an OS 9 cd and the computer was able to boot off of it. What im noticing now is that it is not recognizing the hard drive.
by the way any ideas why it didnt show a question mark or anything if it couldnt find a startup volume?
I only have about six months experience with Pismos but my first was something like this.
Mine started up, I was able to boot to OS 9 and check the system but then it started hanging on the gray screen then nothing. When I got my second Pismo, I switched some parts around and found that the processor died for unknown reasons.
Also a 256MB RAM stick was causing the system to crash on Pismo #1 and #2. Interestingly, the same 256MB stick works fine in Pismo #3 (received Wednesday for $31+ shipping!)
So some erratic problems are difficult to figure unless you have extra parts to swap.
I would try the hard drive in another machine (or try another hard drive in the Pismo), if you can, to see if it is the hard drive or controller or possibly the cable.
Well after playing with it for a little while I ended up throwing a new hard drive in it, installing tiger, and am currently using it to make this post. I guess it was a decent buy for 29.99 via ebay. although it needs a new pram battery which i found new for $18.99 and im gonna have to find a new main battery since this one doesnt seem to want to hold a charge, but all in all im happy with it.
Great to hear another Pismo is saved from the electronic dustbin!
The flashing question mark is a little program that runs from Open Firmware. You can usually cancel this program by pressing ctrl-z. It should drop into Open Firmware.
If you type
dir hd:\
as per http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2001.html on a working hard drive you should be able to see the files on there.
The gray screen is basically due to the faulty hard drive (which you now know was faulty) hanging the ATA bus.