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pcd2k · Apr 11, 2005, 08:26 PM

About a week ago my G3 hit the wall. It happened immediately after I had installed Panther final update. I rebooted the mac then nothing absolutely nothing I left it alone for a whole 24 hours without touching anything, so in the end I pulled the power cord and hit the boot up button still nothing left it alone for another day till finally I belived that it was no more. Since then I've tried all sorts of alternative internal rearrangements such as a borrowed new video card, and this last attempt I audibly heard one of the drives start for about 3 seconds then nothing, I'm not overtly perturbed that this has happened since I second guessed that this might be so when I decided to save for a another machine.I would like to be able to start moreso because its probably worth a little more !

Some pc friends have told me that a pc motherboard has it over a mac motherboard merely because the pc motherboard has a few diagnostic tricks on the motherboard that the mac doesn't have, or do they ?

Any clues anyone ?

Tenacious Dyl · Apr 11, 2005, 08:33 PM

this may sound a little silly... but check ALL your connections on your board and on your devices (optical, harddrives, etc (floppy?)... A barely not-fully-plugged in optical drive rendered my g3 (beige) useless as far as I could tell for QUITE some time... until i opened it up played around with cables... and then it was fine.

Odd that u did a software install and THEN it happened... maybe something is figgity or stupid in there... also... did u update any necessary firmware in the past?

pcd2k · Apr 11, 2005, 09:24 PM

The firmware update could be a problem only that earlier that evening I used a cd panther upgrade and it should have mentioned that only because in this inbetween time I have been getting a friends iMac up to working order and when I tried to upgrade from system 9 with the panther upgrade cd I kept on getting a dialogue telling me that the machine needed a newer firmware upgrade. I went to the apple web site numerous times looking for such an animal, coincidently I decided to upgrade 9.1 to 9.2.2 heck it took a while via 56k then a couple of days later Software upgrade reported the missing firmware.

I wish it were that simple !

OreoCookie · Apr 12, 2005, 03:37 AM

What G3 are you talking about, beige or B/W?

pcd2k · Apr 12, 2005, 07:44 AM

b/w 350 Mghtz 384 ram I think its a rev 2

OreoCookie · Apr 12, 2005, 08:32 AM

Originally posted by pcd2k:
b/w 350 Mghtz 384 ram I think its a rev 2

Do you see obvious damage on the motherboard or smell something? (Take a look at the capacitors on the motherboard.)

If you cannot see any obvious damage on the motherboard, your power supply could be dead. To find out whether or not it is alive, you can measure the voltage between the various connectors. If you are sure, your power supply died, you can try to replace it with an ATX power supply. (Please note that you have to be comfortable rewiring stuff, because you have to rewire the psu! I would try only if you are experienced with hardware!) Or buy a replacement off ebay for instance. In either case, it won't be cheap and there is no guarantee it will work.

In my experience, regular PC mobos are nowhere better than Mac motherboards (I exclude the motherboard of my IBM server here). If you don't even hear beeps, you are in trouble.

I'm afraid that I would prepare myself to buy a new computer.