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Help with an old Mac clone

T

thecow

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 24, 2003
400
0
Timonium MD
I have a Power Computing Power Center 132 that I am trying to revive. It sat in my basement for about 2 years and it was never turned on during that time. Before I put it down there it ran OS 9 perfectly well. I brought it up because I wanted to use it as a printer server for the Apple laser printer that I have. The first time I pressed the power button, the only thing that happened was the fans turning on. I jiggled the ram a little bit and made sure all of the connections were good. Than when I pressed the power button it showed a picture of a disk with a question mark on it. I tried booting from the cd that came with it and it still showed the question mark. I played around with the SCSI jumpers and it still didn't work. I am out of ideas. Can anyone help?

Edit: It has a sonnet G3 upgrade card in it, but when I pulled it out it didn't even get to the question mark.
 
vraxtus

vraxtus

macrumors 65816
Aug 4, 2004
1,044
30
San Francisco, CA
thecow said:
I have a Power Computing Power Center 132 that I am trying to revive. It sat in my basement for about 2 years and it was never turned on during that time. Before I put it down there it ran OS 9 perfectly well. I brought it up because I wanted to use it as a printer server for the Apple laser printer that I have. The first time I pressed the power button, the only thing that happened was the fans turning on. I jiggled the ram a little bit and made sure all of the connections were good. Than when I pressed the power button it showed a picture of a disk with a question mark on it. I tried booting from the cd that came with it and it still showed the question mark. I played around with the SCSI jumpers and it still didn't work. I am out of ideas. Can anyone help?

Edit: It has a sonnet G3 upgrade card in it, but it didn't even get to the question mark.
Click to expand...


I don't know about desktops but I had an old Duo 280C that used to work fine, then one day after a year or two of non use I pulled it out and it wouldn't even start up... the comp may just be dead.
 
crazzyeddie

crazzyeddie

macrumors 68030
Dec 7, 2002
2,792
1
Florida, USA
lol, pulling out the G3 upgrade card leaves the machine sans CPU since its been using that to startup (even if there is another CPU, computers often have problems going from add-on card back to primary CPU).
 
T

thecow

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 24, 2003
400
0
Timonium MD
After I pulled the CPU, I put it back in after I shut it down. I was just pulling pieces to see if anything was bad. It did the same thing with the old CPU.
 
Sun Baked

Sun Baked

macrumors G5
May 19, 2002
14,937
157
Ever think of checking/changing the battery?

Some of the machines built during that period have bad reactions to dead batteries.

---

Edit: As crazzyeddie mentioned, the add-on card can be a problem -- especially with a dead battery.

The card may have required something to be loaded into PRAM, and the dead battery means it's no longer there.

May have to redo the entire upgrade card sequence after the new battery is installed.
 
T

thecow

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 24, 2003
400
0
Timonium MD
I didn't think of changing the battery. The battery is just a 3.7v lithium battery that I should be able to get at a camera store. I will try that tomorrow.
 
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