Re: salvaging Powerbase 200 PCI
On Fri, 7 Jul 2000 cfm@maine.com wrote:
>
> Our 1996 Powerbase 200 603ev PCI Mac clone died yesterday.
> Sometimes it was Mac, mostly it was one of our network backups.
> The drives spin up, there's enough video to gray the screen
> but nothing else. Oh well.
>
> Is there any reason not to put the whole thing in the trash?
> It's got an MB with CPU and video on riser cards and PCI slots
> running off the video card. I'm guessing that none of that
> stuff is upgradeable/replaceable and that the geometry of
> the case makes it useless too. So the NIC cards and RAM
> are useless; at least I can salvage the SCSI stuff?
In my opinion you should try to narrow down as much as possible the cause
of this. That is remove each card in turn and find if the system behaves
the same way. Same with disks, floppy, etc.
*If* you find a possible faulty part, replace it. There is no need to
throw away a whole machine if only one part is faulty.
If you don't, and you suspect faulty video, try to connect a serial
console to the mac, maybe the system boots up to a point and this might
show (esp. trying from OF).
In my experience it's never a *really* vital part that gets blown
up. CPUs, RAM, etc are all protected by other less important parts. Of
course if the system gets shortcircuited it may be worse than this. But
unless something like that happened, you can probably find the fault.
> Or is there some sort of board standardization for PCI
> powerpc so that I can at least get it to run linux again?
> And then we can jut buy an iMac at Staples.
If the NIC or video card or hard disk or even cpu got blown up, it's just
a case of replacing the respective part. If however there is a fault in
the motherboard, then unless you are good at soldering -and have a
professional quality soldering iron/pump- you will probably have to
replace the motherboard.
> Failing that, are there any debian developers that need
> hardware from same? 10/100 21064 NICs and RAM. I'm not
> sure how to tell if anything else even works. It's not like
> I have spare parts to swap in and out.
what kind of RAM?
Best of luck
Konstantinos
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