[badpenny]

Hello all,
I have an old 266 iMac which I flashed to 1.2 in lieu of a panther upgrade for my little girl
she has been using my 1.67 powerbook and quite liked OS X so in an attempt to wean her away from the PC I gave her the iMac

Anyway it was running OS 8.5.1 fine immediately before the firmware updater.
however less that a second into the firmware flash it stopped responding and the status bar sat unmoving for 1 hour until I had enough and pulled the plug.

it had been previously (several months ago) upgraded to a single stick of 256mb ram (which it recognised & used fine) and a 40gb HDD partitioned at 7.5gb for the OS

now when I press the power button all I get is an amber power led, I can hear the fan running, the HDD spins up and the monitor clicks/bongs as usual.
However there is no startup chime and the screen stays black, nothing else happens.

I read somewhere that the flyback transformer causes a flash when its broken and the machine boots up,, however there is no evidence of any flash from the case so my uneducated guess is that its not that.

Things I have tried:
reset the cuda
removed the CPU and reset memory (in case it had become dislodged slightly)
disconnected the CDROM & HDD

Im thinking the flash failing has wiped or at least damaged the chipset, so where can I go from here?
is there a way to reflash or repair it.

I have searched the web for this but the answers I found were about slot loaders and most of them said this info is for slot loaders only due to different architecture.

many thanks in advance for any help or advice you can offer me here
regards
badpenny

[osxrules]

I don't know if you can afford it or not but I'd suggest buying a new machine. A 233 imac is not really capable of running OS X adequately. My dad has one and it is infuriatingly slow. Even my brother's 350MHz imac is painful running OS X - their graphics cards don't support quartz extreme.

I found imacs with nearly double the clock speed and a decent amount of Ram on ebay for about £50-100. If you wait until January, the mactels might come out and you should get some people selling their G4 Minis cheap on ebay.

The Minis themselves look quite cheap on ebay just now actually. You should be able to get one in the range £200-300.

I'm not sure if this will fix the firmware issue but you can try booting while holding down command-option-p-r.

[bradoesch]

I wonder if that was the firmware with more strict RAM specification requirements. Do you have the Apple RAM the machine shipped with to try?

[iLikebeer]

Is the 266 a rev A or rev B? I think it's rev B so:

Did you try starting up with the paperclip pushing the firmware reset button? It's the lower of the 2, and if the firmware update had been successful, it would have prompted you to do that. Hold it in, press the power button, and hold it in until you hear a long tone. Maybe the updater worked but then the computer froze up. Probably not, but it couldn't hurt to try.

From http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60385 (This is for the imac updater 3.0 but says the rev B and above need the button pushed in on restart. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60384 is specific to the 1.2 update.

"Conditions that May Cause the iMac Firmware Updater to Fail

There are other conditions that may cause the updater to fail.

* If power is removed during the update, the Boot ROM may become corrupted and not retrievable.
* If a /A configuration is restarted using the paper clip by mistake, the update will not complete. Power must be pulled for 15 seconds and the update attempted again. "

Also, if you get it to work, i'd recommend upgrading to 8.6 or 10.3.9. OS X is kind of slow on a 233, but it isn't that bad. Works fine for internet, email, and iTunes.