If your beige G3 fails to beep or boot
by Simon at 15:20 23/08/06 (Blogs::Simon)
Mac OS9.2.2-based beige G3 desktop has been working find for many years, this morning failed to boot and instead crashed into MacsBug after starting to load its extensions.

The only clue was that there was no startup chime.

The beige G3 series Macs had no onboard audio, relying instead on a 'personality' card which came in two flavours: "whisper" and "wings" - the former being audio only, the latter capable of full AV.

My G3 has a 'whisper' version, and re-seating it restored things to normality. I guess the dust build-up in the last 8 years finally got too much for the electrons to overcome :-)

What was quite confusing was that my old TechTool rescue CD managed to boot it just fine. It seems that OS 8.5.1 through 9.1 can cope with a duff personality card, but 9.2.2 can't (at least not reliably - I did get one successful 9.2.2 boot out of it during various test cycles prior to reseating the card, which only served to be even more confusing!)

--
simon

<< Lunstice over Sidbury Hill 200... Extending the Stonehenge Avenu... >>
Powered by
Powered by Novacaster