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neonboy420 · Jun 19, 2004, 05:05 PM

Hello-
I recently acquired an imac dv slot-load machine at a *grumble* garage sale. the seller told me her son upgraded and took the parts he needed, and left the shell. opening up the ram slot, i saw there wasnt any memory in it, so i thought hey, 80 bux and a stick of ram aint bad, so i bought him and brought the lil guy home. upon clicking in the ram i got a happy chime, and a white screen which soon turned grey. on farther exploration(after trying to stuff a system disk in) i was a little angered in discovering that the optical and hard drives had been removed! its looking more and more like a bad deal=(
questions being: can i use a pc-style cd-rom just for booting? i put the hard drive from an old 6500 in there(system 9) and 192mb ram from my old pentium 650. still the same thing. happy chime, white screen fades to grey(with black bars at the top/bottom) the hard drive crunches and spins, but nothing. the light is green, btw. anyone have a similar experience? whats wrong with the little guy. hes so cute(and so better than my 8600/300) i would like to fix him!

Detrius · Jun 20, 2004, 08:32 PM

You could do some slightly better diagnostics if you had a firewire device to boot from.

neonboy420 · Jun 20, 2004, 10:12 PM

i can buy the internal drive cheaper than a firewire drive, i'd go that route first, as im trying not to break the bank to see if this guy even works! can i use a plain ide cable? it seems as though the imacs logic board has extra pins(power for the cd drive?) what exactly would i do to 'netboot' someone reccommended that to me

neonboy420 · Jun 21, 2004, 12:07 AM

I have since booted into open firmware, and held down option, both actions produced results, but not promising ones, please help!

Dex13 · Jun 21, 2004, 05:19 PM

How about booting of a CD, you have any OS 9 discs or OS X ones around?

Detrius · Jun 21, 2004, 05:34 PM

Originally posted by neonboy420:
i can buy the internal drive cheaper than a firewire drive, i'd go that route first, as im trying not to break the bank to see if this guy even works! can i use a plain ide cable? it seems as though the imacs logic board has extra pins(power for the cd drive?) what exactly would i do to 'netboot' someone reccommended that to me

Netbooting requires having another Mac running OS X server. If you don't have a working internal hard drive, you'll need 10.3 server. You also *must* have firmware 4.1.9f to even think about attempting this.

If you are anywhere near the mountains of Western North Carolina, I regularly use this as a diagnostic technique. Apple gave us a free copy of 10.3 server.

neonboy420 · Jun 22, 2004, 12:02 AM

im in birmingham=) alot of people have urged me to abandon trying to make it work. mostly because they have an imac that i can buy for *only* 200 dollars. point being i can install a cd-drive, hard disk and if its a worst case scenerio a logic board for that much and not pay super high shipping and have to do this over again on a machine i paid more for. someone told me if i dont get a disk with a question mark then my logic board is dead? please tell me this isnt so! i can boot to open firmware, is only half of the board fried, then? heh heh still in need of help..

Dex13 · Jun 22, 2004, 11:29 AM

Ok this is what I would do � lol I have a 6500 and I just found the old hard drive � replace the hard drive but try and have a friend install already OS 9 on it or yourself on the 6500 ( the 6500 will only recognize hard drives > 4gb if you have an OS 9 disc to install from and then you are able to install up to 9.1 on the 6500 which is perfect for the imac as well). And then for the optical drive you need a 3.5 " ( < --- Where you can buy there for $35 About 30 Pounds? ).