[mad cow disease]

I am currently experiencing complete system failure with my B&W G3. It all started when I killed my motherboard (long story). Everything has gone downhill from there. Long story short, I purchased a working G3 motherboard on eBay, installed it, stuck in the CPU, reconnected cables, and after a week hunting down the correct jumpers for the board, I tried to boot it.

Nothing. I don't get any startup chime, no signal to the monitor, beeps indicating a problem, or anything. That's assuming the damn thing even powers up, which sometimes it REFUSES to do. The fans spin and the hard drive starts up, but that's it. The DVD-ROM won't even start up (no lights), and I am at wit's end, having already dropped 1/2 the price of a Mac Mini into this POS to get it upgraded and working again, and if it doesn't work I will eventually cut my losses and throw the damn thing out. I am not using a Apple keyboard to start it up, but I doubt that has anything to do with it.

I have:

1.) Reseated processor
2.) Reseated RAM
3.) Reseated video, removed everything except for processor, video, RAM, and hard drive.
4.) Quadruple-checked jumper settings

Hard to believe it was working less than two weeks ago, until I dropped a hard drive on the motherboard.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[jamil5454]

It may be your PSU. Either that or the CPU may be gone.

[littlegreenspud]

Some times mine does that. Getting it to start can be a black art. Things that have worked, but not always(!) are:

Removing video card then reinserting it,
Pressing the CUDA switch,
Removing and reinserting the SCSI card,
and the most reliable,
waiting for the hard drive to spin up before turning on the monitor!

I don't do all of the above, just one and if it does not work then the next etc.
Then it will work perfectly for months before failing to start.

[mad cow disease]

Well, I finally got the blasted thing to start up. After disasembling and reassembling it twice, it somehow booted up. Mind you, this took the better part of an hour and a half.

It is now humming along very nicely and I've managed to get the OWC Mercury in there running at 500 MHz, the stock speed. I suppose the next step is to see if I can bump it to 600 MHz, but we'll see..

Thanks for the help.

[ChrisB]

I would sincerely see if you can get a copy of TechTool Pro and run their hardware tests. There is definitely something going on there. It might be worth a visit to a certified Apple Repair shop.

[bowwowman]

Originally posted by mad cow disease:
at 500 MHz, the stock speed. I suppose the next step is to see if I can bump it to 600 MHz, but we'll see..

Thanks for the help.

You may wanna consider making that jump in smaller increments, like 25 or 50mhz at a time, just to be safe....some cpu's can do some extra mhz no problem, others can not.

I got one of OWC's G4/500mhz upgrades about 2 years ago, and sucessfully o/c'd it to 700 for a short time, but my smurf box soon became unstable, so I backed it off to 650, where it has been ever since, with a small, flat fan on top for good measure I gradually bumped it up by 50mhz each time, ran it a week, then bumped it again until reaching the 700mhz mark

And this was through many updates to OS X and some HDWr upgrades along the way, so I consider myself fortunate, since it is still running rock solid to this day

[MORT A POTTY]

or you way wish to consider a 1.1Ghz G3 ZIF upgrade w/ 1MB of L2 Cache

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/item/...LGPFZGX11001M/

in stock, 350 bucks shipped.

[mad cow disease]

The guy I bought it from was able to push it to 550+ using a beige with a 83MHz bus. As far as 25 MHz increments is concerned, that isn't possible using the multipliers without adjusting the bus speed and without good RAM, I'm not messing with that at all.

Ideally I'd like to have it sitting at 600, but I'll take 550 if that's all I can get.

...and as far as a $350 1.1 GHz CPU is concerned...for a 6-year old computer using parts which weren't cutting-edge when it was released, I'll pass.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by ChrisB:
I would sincerely see if you can get a copy of TechTool Pro and run their hardware tests. There is definitely something going on there. It might be worth a visit to a certified Apple Repair shop.

The only thing that TechTool Pro is good for is surface scans. This won't help you any.