Death Chime?

[OutThere]

I turned off my brand-new (I've had it for 10 days) PowerBook this morning for a little cleaning...I wipe it down every once in a while with a moist paper towel.

When I plugged it back in and pressed the power button, instead of turning on the fans went on full blast, a chime I've never heard before played, sort of like a long steady tone for 2-3 seconds, and then the sleep light started flashing really rapidly for about 5 seconds. About 10 seconds later the hard drive spun down. I pressed the power button again and it started right up with no problem after, but I'm a bit nervous.

Was this a death chime? I can't find anything about them anywhere, or anything about a rapidly-flashing-sleep-light. All I know is that when my iBook's logic board failed it wouldn't start up and the fan came on all the way (though it did that every few weeks even after the logic board had been replaced, and I had no real problems with it after).

I'm off to run a hardware test.

 

[yellow]

Sounds more like what happens when you update the firmware.

 

[OutThere]

Ah. Well, silly me. I haven't done a firmware update in years and I absent mindedly force-quit Software Update last time I ran it (a bad habit I know)...there must have been a firmware update in there somewhere.

Thanks man.

 

[yellow]

Well, no.. firmware does not (to my knowledge) come through Software Update. I was just saying what you described sounded a lot like what you do when you installed firmware updates on OS 9 boxes. The long startup chime etc.

 

[MacsRgr8]

A couple of firmware updates do come through software update.

Usually they appear with the explicit warning that after installing that it will cause some kind of abnormal action.

Take the iMac G5 Rev. A Sleep light updater.

 

[yellow]

Hmm first I've heard of that.. I don't remember any firmware updates for my PB, but maybe we have different revs.