I was given a G3/333 mhz tower sans drives on Friday.
After being informed that some polish had been spilled onto the case :o, I basically stripped it and cleaned out as much of it as I could. After reassembling it and adding a CD-ROM and hard disk, I tried to start it up. The exhaust fan twitches briefly and does not power on at all. An ATX power supply tester tests the power supply as good. I've also tried a different power supply in the same case with the same result.
I placed the logic board in my hacked ATX case, and it powers right up.
I know it's a short somewhere, but I have no clue where to start.
Any suggestions?
I moved the logic board to a hacked ATX case, and it starts up just fine. I would still like to use the original case though, even if for the logic board that was in the ATX case originally.
The obvious question just because it's not mentioned in your post - so please don't be insulted - if it starts fine with an ATX supply, did the jumper on the mobo get moved back to the Mac PS position when you test it in its original case?
The original power supply for a Beige G3 Tower is ATX-compatible. The logic board was set to PS2. I didn't change it when placing it in the ATX case.
If it were in a desktop case, it would be set to Mac.
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There's no such thing as a dumb question.
I placed the contents of what was in the ATX case into the tower and brought it to work. Once there, I connected a 2GB IDE drive and an old 2X Apple SCSI CD-ROM in an external case (no SCSI cables in the case except the 68-pin one from the ATTO card.
It now powers up just fine. Weird.....
Currently it's installing MacOS 9 slowly.
Well, I had it working.
I took it to a computer shop to add another hard disk last night and it went to the open firmware screen with a single underline character. Pressing the CUDA and removing the battery did nothing.
The only thing I can think of is that when I installed MacOS 9 on it, I used a 2x SCSI CD-ROM drive. When I tried it at the shop, I didn't have it connected.
Any hints?
Currently the only time the G3 tower acts up is at the local computer shop....
Currently I have a 5.1 GB Quantum Bigfoot drive in it with a 32x Creative CD-ROM drive and am in the process of installing Jaguar on it.