Help! G3 won't start..Bomb icon..

[Hackcomic.com]

My g3 blue and white 350 is having a major problem. When it starts up in 9.2.2 the bar goes about 1/4 of the way then the cursor icon spins and spins and after a minute or so- the spinning icon turns into a bomb icon.

I tried to start the computer from my Norton disc and it does pretty much the same thing- loads 1/4 of the startup and then nothing but spinning icon.

I tried Pram reset but to no avail.

I also took out the extra RAM I put in years ago- but that didn't help either.


Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Perhaps a bad hard drive. you have anything in the pci slots?

 

[Hackcomic.com]

Well, I can't even get it to start from a different disc- so that can't be a hard drive problem - can it?

 

[Sun Baked]

Reach in and unplug the drive cable, then try booting from the CD.

It should then boot, if it does -- then there is a problem with the boot blocks, bootROM, disk catalog, etc.

These ROM in RAM machines will crash hard if you mess up anything in the initial boot process on a drive in the boot drives ATA chain.

I've usually found if this happens, you need to unplug the drive cable from the motherboard, and boot the machine off another ATA chain (I use an extra drive on the optical drive chain) then select this drive as the boot drive.

Then you "may" be able to reinstall the problematic drive cable and fix the drive.

---

Of course every now and then the actual drive dies -- and recovery isn't possible even when sticking the drive in a ROM in ROM machine (or FW case).