[ecrelin]

I am trying to find any information about the meaning of the stop symbol on startup when the machine refuses to boot. Is it a bad RAM symbol or bad boot blocks on the drive? This is a 30 Gb Fujitsu drive in a Lombard 333 Powerbook running 10.3. I have another PB here and swapped the drive, and got the same thing, I was able to rebuild the directory with Disk Warrior (it had issues) and after another failure to start I did and Achive and install af 10.3 again. When I went to restart it gave me the sign again but I pulled the CD drive out and looked back at the screen and it was starting up. It came up perfectly with all the multiuser settings etc. I swapped it back to the other machine and now it did the same thing and I can't seem the snap it out of it. Is this drive cooked and why does it lock up the bus? Inserting a CD will not spin it up, once ti has the stop sign it just sits. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Ed

[mgehman]

Originally posted by ecrelin:
I am trying to find any information about the meaning of the stop symbol on startup when the machine refuses to boot. Is it a bad RAM symbol or bad boot blocks on the drive? This is a 30 Gb Fujitsu drive in a Lombard 333 Powerbook running 10.3. I have another PB here and swapped the drive, and got the same thing, I was able to rebuild the directory with Disk Warrior (it had issues) and after another failure to start I did and Achive and install af 10.3 again. When I went to restart it gave me the sign again but I pulled the CD drive out and looked back at the screen and it was starting up. It came up perfectly with all the multiuser settings etc. I swapped it back to the other machine and now it did the same thing and I can't seem the snap it out of it. Is this drive cooked and why does it lock up the bus? Inserting a CD will not spin it up, once ti has the stop sign it just sits. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Ed

Ok, I'm trying to get a clear picture. The Lombard won't start with either drive? You can put the drive in another computer, repair it with DiskWarrior and it works in that computer? How much RAM is in the Lombard? If you have enough, I would take one stick out at a time and reboot. I seem to remember that this is related to the processor or motherboard. Let me know.

[ecrelin]

both are Lombards w/384 RAM. Once the Apple comes up on the screen it quickly displays a stop symbol and simply freezes. It will boot off the CD with the c key down and I did run Disk Utility and it said the drive was fine, I fixed permissions just in case. After I reinstalled the system I then experienced the one time startup but in Disk Utility I ran it for a while with no problem and even restarted it and then quickly swapped it back to the other machine. It failed to start, I swapped it back and same thing so it wasn't the machine just the drive. I was able to change startup disk and set it to OS 9.2.2 on the drive and it hung on the smiling mac but booted fine the next time. In another thread someone suggested that the board on the drive that acts as the master was failing and that the drive might work fine as a slave drive. I dragged the OS 9 system to a removable hard drive and set it as startup and now it boots everytime, seems it may be the "Master" circuitry that is shot on the drive, sound real?

[Xtopolop]

I'm currently trying to fix a friend's computer with the same problem. It is a dual G4/450 (with jaguar and classic partitions). I get the stop symbol both booting off the OS X partition and booting off any X cd (10.1/2/3). It does, however, boot just fine into OS 9 which is strange. I just pulled the drive out and put it into my G4 as a slave and both partitions show up just fine. I have no idea what is causing this problem, but am going to try booting my G4 off this funky disk as soon as I'm done backing things up.

EDIT: I just installed a clean "erase and install" copy of 10.3 onto the evil hard drive via my G4. It was set as a slave drive, and booted just fine. Then I put it back into my friend's G4 and got the same stop sign, regardless of whether or not the drive was set to master or slave.

EDIT 2: Since it boots fine into OS 9, is it safe to assume that the ram is not causing any problems?

EDIT 3: Tried using some of my own ram and still got the same results.