Hi All,
A while back, I purchased a used Daystar Genesis 528MP from the classifieds section of this site. Problem is, it will not boot. It came with a 4GB IBM SCSI hard drive, a flashed 3Dfx graphics card, and a Sonnet Tempo ata/66 controller. Also included was a Yamaha SCSI CD burner and a 24x Apple IDE CD drive. 640 B of RAM - 5 identical 128MB sticks.
When the computer is turned on, it chimes and the hard drive spins up. Nothing else happens.
What I did: Removed the ATA card - no difference. I purchased an X Micro Twin Turbo card - looks brand new. No difference. Disconnected all internal devices: HD, CDs, Floppy - no difference. Replaced PRAM battery and reset CUDA - no difference. I have tried every combination of RAM I can think of, interleaved and not, and that doesn't seem to matter either.
The kicker is that the thing will not respond to a PRAM reset. Hold down the keys before starting up, right after starting up, right after chime, no matter - it just ignores it. I have tried different keyboards.
I do get the Mac chime, and I get the broken glass sound without RAM, so I assume the 4x 132MHz PPC processor card is functional - if it wasn't, I wouldn't get a chime, right?
I recently read the excellent PowerExpress thread - interesting read. Would the open firmware thing work with this daystar machine? The thread described a procedure of hooking up to another Mac with a serial cable and using a program called Zterm on a functional Mac to access the firmware of the other machine. Is this possible with my Daystar, and what would I do with it?
Open to any and all suggestions.
Disconnect the power supply, pull the PRAM battery and leave it like that for a day or two. That should completely drain all power and allow a total reset.
The Genesis is an openfirmware machine, so you can use the serial port and a terminal program to control it from another machine.
dan k