I was helping a local nonprofit get their poor overworked little iMac (probably a 450MHz-ish slot loader) into shape last night by upgrading it from 8.6 to 9.2, as well as installing OSX on it (before I realized that it only had 96MB of RAM--though surprisingly, it did actually start up with Jaguar).
The install went fine, but the computer was clearly acting strangely before I even started--when I turned it on, the thing booted into Open Firmware the first time, and my 9.1 disc gave errors the first couple of times I tried to upgrade the OS. It did eventually complete the installs and upgrades, and behaved properly through several restarts.
I left it booting into 9.2.2, shut it down last night, and turned it off at the power strip (they always do that). This morning, no monitor. First, it started up properly, but with a black screen. Pushing keys made it clear that it was properly started (you could hear the voice read the dialogue "Are you sure you want to shut down?" when you pushed the power button on the keyboard), but no monitor signal.
I tried resetting the PRAM, which caused it to do nothing, as in not even have the hard drive spin up or monitor warm up--just sit there with the power light on in silence. Tried powering down and restarting (even the reset button on the side produced no response) several times, and eventually the hard drive did spin up once, but only once, and the behavior was otherwise the same.
Anyway, the thing is backed up (that, I did before trying ANYTHING, particulary since it was acting up) and obviously broken in some way, but I'm wondering if anybody has had a similar experience and might have a suggestion as to what I might look to fix--something as simple as the battery, or is it something more major like a fried power supply/transformer board?
The install went fine, but the computer was clearly acting strangely before I even started--when I turned it on, the thing booted into Open Firmware the first time, and my 9.1 disc gave errors the first couple of times I tried to upgrade the OS. It did eventually complete the installs and upgrades, and behaved properly through several restarts.
I left it booting into 9.2.2, shut it down last night, and turned it off at the power strip (they always do that). This morning, no monitor. First, it started up properly, but with a black screen. Pushing keys made it clear that it was properly started (you could hear the voice read the dialogue "Are you sure you want to shut down?" when you pushed the power button on the keyboard), but no monitor signal.
I tried resetting the PRAM, which caused it to do nothing, as in not even have the hard drive spin up or monitor warm up--just sit there with the power light on in silence. Tried powering down and restarting (even the reset button on the side produced no response) several times, and eventually the hard drive did spin up once, but only once, and the behavior was otherwise the same.
Anyway, the thing is backed up (that, I did before trying ANYTHING, particulary since it was acting up) and obviously broken in some way, but I'm wondering if anybody has had a similar experience and might have a suggestion as to what I might look to fix--something as simple as the battery, or is it something more major like a fried power supply/transformer board?