I have a 350 mhz B&W which is now not doing anything.. heres the line of events... got it from a friend who had it for years, worked fine when i got it. i upped the ram and hd and basically added a bunch of drives to my liking. used it for a month like this no problems. then it started to boot slower and slower. so i cleaned the HD out and re installed panther which i had on there before and was working fine. i tried a few different ways of installing this, after and before OS9. nothing seemed to make it boot as fast as it did before. and just a week ago i left it on all day and it hung in sleep mode, barely rebooted, and it ran for another couple days without touching it, then i shut it down. now it wont boot at all, and for a few hours this morning didnt even get the start up chime. ive replaced the battery with some known good 3.6v and even a home made one that measured perfect voltage. ive checked ram, hd's everything possible, reseated everything including the cpu... are they known to just slowly die like this? i had an apple before that did similar things but never stoped all the way, just got slower... but what sucks the most is that i spent $150 on this when i could have saved that towards a mini.... any help would be great cause ive used apples all my life and now im just about at the end of my string with this one... thanks alot!
-Justin
http://www.applefritter.com/node/8022
I posted some of my experience with the B&W at the end of that thread. Did you overstress your machine with upgrades? Did you add any PCI controller cards?
oh yea i saw that topic, thanks. about the machine i had just a USB card, the stock ati video card, 512 mb ram, 15gb and 40gb hd's. swapped out cd rom for dvd drive. regular apple imac keyboard and a usb mouse that ive had for years. im going to try the things you mentioned plus the reseting of nvram, but she doesnt post or do anything with the screen and no hd activity ahd half the time doesnt chime. one can only hope that its not gone cause i spent money on this one lol. thus i love free older mac parts and hate paying money for them. thanks for the help ill keep you posted..
-Justin
ok after messing around with it more i tried booting without the ram once more and finnally got some feedback from the computer. i tried this once before and nothing happened. maybe it reset somthing inside?? but she is up and running fine now, like i said before i dont know what did it, but i did reset the NVram once it was up and running and pram. heres the kicker, i re installed every part that was in it before, still works fine. i guess nothing was Bad per say, but maybe somthing in the boot sequence for f-ed up? thanks alot for the help!!!! now i dont have a huge $150 paper weight..
-Justin
Have you checked your SDRAM? There's a good OS 9 RAM check called Dimm First Aid:
http://www.mactcp.org.nz/dimmfirstaid.html
Of course, you don't want PC66 SDRAM in your machine, and you also don't want high density SDRAM. High density will only be half recognized by the B&W. I've found the B&W to be a bit fickle about RAM, so I only use the good stuff, 2-2-2.
i really couldnt tell you anything but the size of chips i have and that they are pc100or 133 and they work fine now.... i really cant explain what happened to this thing... seems to boot faster too which is even more un explainable...i just spent some time on it playing some games too and seems to be pretty stable..
-Justin