eMac trauma

[Ollie C]

Hey all, I'm having a spot of bother with an eMac I wanted to nurse back to health.

It was originally 1.25ghz with bad capacitors. I let a friend help me replace the caps which led to a butchered board which I'd say is very broken now. (Incidentally I did another one myself which works fine. )

Anywho, I bought a board I found on ebay going cheap, it's a CPU step up, the 1.42ghz board. The board is unused and came in the original Apple packaging and with ethernet ID sticker etc. I couldn't find anything beforehand to indicate that it wouldn't work and it's rare to find just a board on ebay now so I went for it. Physically, the boards are identical, it went in the emac without a problem.

I lovingly assembled it all, fairly sure I've done it properly.. stuck to the Apple service source throughout, both ways. I plug it in and press the power button and the CRT makes the usual noise and sometimes the fan will whir up for a moment then it goes completely dead. It never gets far enough for an image to appear on the display.

It seems like a power issue to me, I have tried turning it on with the super drive disconnected but it did the same. I've also tried resetting the PMU to no luck.

Anyone got any ideas to help?

Thanksss,
Ollie.

 

[76ShovelHead]

I'd suggest checking the ram, as the board as you say is identical, and i cant see why it wouldn't work-but perhaps when you and your friend demolished the last board, you accidently fried your ram.

 

[Makosuke]

That doesn't sound like a symptom of bad RAM to me--normally that'd either panic or fail the startup test and give the corresponding bad memory beeps (I think...).

Two easy things to try before trying to debug a power problem: Make sure the motherboard battery is good--with a board that old it could well be dead, and a dead PRAM battery can result in exactly that symptom. If you have a voltmeter you can test it, or put in the old one from your old Motherboard (if you didn't already) or just buy a fresh one to test.

Don't forget the PMU reset that's part of the replacement battery procedure, as a crashed PMU (which could easily have happened with what you've done to the thing) can have exactly the symptoms you're seeing:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3005

If that doesn't help, try removing the battery, unplugging it, pushing the power button, letting it sit for maybe 10-30 minutes, re-adding the battery, push the PMU button, plug it in, and hope for the best. I've had that revive G4-era computers that were acting up with power issues.