[jabberwock486]

i got a few of these modles at a show. all booted up fine and seem to be in good condition. i bought these to learn more about the MAC, the OS and the hardware. so far seems totaly different than the common X86 stuff.
anyways the first one boots up and seems to have the most stuff installed, hardware wise. like a networkign card. so i plan on useing it as the base and the others as parts. all are the same modle 5400/180 powermac.

anyways i was cleaning it off, was last used in 99 at a school. so there was alot of educational stuff i was deleting. a friend came over and saw a favorite, oregon trail. however a storm was coming so he grabed the back and turned it off the manual way.
now the system will not boot.

gets to the boot screen, shows a disk with a "?" in it or an "X" so what do i do now.

also i want to make MAC bootable disks, it would be best if i can do it from my linux or windows system. i downloaded 7.5.3 and the updates.

[reader50]

The blinking floppy icon means the system cannot find a valid boot partition - the HD has taken some damage from being turned off the hard way.

If you have an Install CD, boot from it and run Disk First Aid on the hard drive.

No Install CD, or no CD drive? Then you need a bootable floppy with Disk First Aid on it, so you can fix the HD. If you've got the 7.5.3 download (and the 7.5.5 update) you should find a "network boot disk" among the images. That is a stripped-down bootable disk, should have enough room for a couple utilities on it.

[jabberwock486]

ok thanks
so next question, yes i do have a CD drive. however i dont know it this model supports booting from CD. has a debian version for PPC.
however are there bootable CD iso images?

how would i make a MAC boot floppy on a linux or windows system?

[Cincinnatus]

Its also possible that the internal battery is dead. If this is the case, then the NVRAM (non-volatile RAM) will be volatile. I had this problem on an old 6100. The HD was fine, the system just "forgot" where the boot device was. The interesting thing was that if I hit the restart button, and did a warm reboot, the system would come up fine. I can't remember, though, if there was a key combo to force booting off of the inernal HD...should be some info on lowendmac.com on this...

/Cincinnatus

[reader50]

Here is Apple's spec page for the 5400/180. It shipped with OS 7.5.3 and is good all the way to OS 9. The simplest answer is to find a Mac friend who has a retail CD install disk within that range, especially OS 8.6 or 9.x. Such a CD should allow you to repair the internal HD.

The internal HD is an IDE interface, bring it to any friend with a PowerMac and they can fix it there too. Any friend with a Mac that has a floppy drive can turn a floppy image into a boot floppy, if you don't want to extract the HD.

Cincinnatus has a good point, the internal battery may be dead - which can cause the system to not boot. But I'd guess at HD corruption since it was booting until you did a hard shutdown.

I don't know if Windows or Linux can easily turn a Mac floppy image into a floppy. They are physically capable, since they also use 1.44 MB floppies.

[jabberwock486]

yea i'll look around. i made a boot floppy for an older system in windows before. i have a ton of those battery types so if it is that the i dont really have a problem

[Powaqqatsi]

Originally posted by jabberwock486:
MAC

*shiver*

[jabberwock486]

It's the battery. I replaced it with a fresh. however swaped in a new HD, from same modle. the new HD has MAC OS8.

now time to play with it and learn more about it. we used Apples computers at school as well as windows based system. so thats about all the experince i have had with them.

mind you i have my A+ certification and i am now working on my LPI. I however want to have more knowlege of other systems. Apple was my next choice. Also looking into SUN stuff, however apple is much more common