A friend asked me to look at his dead Performa 6360. After hitting the power key and hearing the initial startup chime... nothing. The monitor remains black without a sign of life. I went through all the troubleshooting steps that I can think of. I replaced the RAM and the battery. I've also tried different monitors. Still nothing after the startup chime. Thought it might be the hard drive so I tried booting from a Norton's Utility Disk and a Mac OS 8 disk... still nothing. Any ideas?

TIA
Dennis

Something might have happened that caused some corruption in the invisible partitions that are on all Mac OS HFS(+) drives. I'm not sure what would have caused this, and sometimes you don't need to do anything since these things have a way of just happening... I offer this explanation because it sounds much like what happened to me when I corrupted my PowerBook's hard drive recently.

I fixed my machine by finding an old boot up disk (a floppy one, CD's and external HD's didn't work for me) and booting up with that and then fixing the drive. The floppy seemed to work because the floppy drives are on separate busses and don't directly communicate with the ATA or SCSI busses during the early boot up processes.

Hope this works, and I'll post anything else if I get another bolt of lightning.

(BTW: I had a hard time finding a tools disk that would fit on a floppy for my machine. System 7.5 seems to work the best. No sence you going through the same trouble: <A HREF="http://www.accesscom/com/~gamba/bootdisks.html" TARGET=_blank>http://www.accesscom.com/~gamba/bootdisks.html
</A>for some reason the hyperlink doesn't work, so you've got to type it manually...)

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Eliott Wolfe
Winnetka, Calif


[This message has been edited by The Wolfe (edited 10-31-2000).]

Eliott,

Thanks for the ideas. I did try booting from a system 7.5 floppy, but had no luck there either. I get the startup chime and then nothing. The monitor remains blank. I'm afraid it might be a bad motherboard, but would like to hear any other suggestions. Thanks

Dennis

A simple thing to try is to clean out the inside of the case thoroughly (just take the logic board out and blow a can of compressed air all around). Be sure to get around the power supply (the left side of the case with the back facing you) and be sure and clean off the logic board with the compressed air.

Taking the front bezel plastic off is kind of a pain (you have to depress two tabs on the bottom of the bezel with screwdrivers, at the same time), but you could always clean out the hard drive area too, since you can't get to it from the back of the machine.


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Eliott Wolfe
Winnetka, Calif