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HELP PLEASE: Trying to revive a Powerbook 100

M

mikejtl

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 27, 2009
50
0
I'm trying to revive my Powerbook 100, and would love some help advice.

Here's the specs: Powerbook 100 4MB Ram, 40MB HD, 16 mhz, external floppy drive.

The last time I started it up I got the flashing question mark inside the floppy icon. Remembering this, but not having my OS disks, I downloaded a copy of System 6.0.1L and put it on a floppy, but when I pulled the powerbook out and turned it on here's what happened:

I get the Apple chime, which I figure is always a good sign. And it sounds like the harddrive is spinning up and the processor is processing...but the screen does not come up the way I expected. It's definitely on, but dark in the center with a 1/4 inch perimeter that glows blue/gray. Adjusting the contrast and brightness do nothing, do not affect the appearance at all.

When I pop the OS floppy it, the floppy drive spins up like it is reading it, then spits it back out.

So, I'm thinking it's one or more of the following:

1. Screen is bad or some connection to it is bad.

2. Graphics chip/card/processor whatever it is in these, is bad or some connection to it is bad.

3. The OS floppy I made didn't work.

4. The PRAM batteries are dead.

5. The whole thing is fried, though if that were the case would I still get the chime?

Any advice on things to try, take apart, diagnose is most appreciated.

BTW: My current computer is a 13" MBP, running Snow Leopard, I borrowed an USB floppy drive, thats what I used to make my System 6 floppy. I don't have access to another pre-OSX machine.

Thanks in advance.
 
Could you post some pictures of the screen?

I'm sure the LCD is probably bad given its age. Without looking it up, does it have an external monitor port? If it does you could try plugging in a monitor to see if you get a display on it.


Good Luck!
-P
 
The most obvious thing that comes to mind is, what kind of disk did you put system 6 on.

Pretty sure it's only going to support SD HFS formatted disks.

OH and i just checked wikipedia..it doesn't support 6.0.1, you need 6.0.8 (although it will partially work with .07 and .05)

Good luck :D

Additional - You'd be better off with a set of 7.0.1 disks.

More Additional - You'd get a crash chime, if anything was seriously up with the hardware.
 
OK, little bit of progress last night. Here's the latest:

1. The floppy drive can read 1.4MB disks, says so on the bottom label.

2. I typed 6.0.1 but I meant 6.0.8L, so that shouldn't be an issue.

3. I read on Lowendmac, that if you let it warm up the screen may come back, sure enough, after a little while it came back and I got the flashing question mark in the floppy icon. I also zapped the PRAM, not sure if that helped.

But the floppy still gets spit out, so maybe I screwed up the copying.

The other strange thing that happens is that if I just let it sit, then instead of going to sleep, it shuts down. Anyone have any thoughts on that?

Is it worth replacing the PRAM batteries? Will that help the shut down issue.

Whats a crash chime?

Also, not Video out on this thing.

Any other ideas, tips, advice, I'd love to hear it.
 
According to EveryMac.com the supported OSes for the PowerBook 100 are 7.0.1-7.5.1,7.5.3-7.5.5, so I don't imagine it's going to boot from a System 6 floppy.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPod Touch 2G 8GB: Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

Unless you can get a battery for under $5, I'd give it up. I recently got a 2000 toshiba portege working, but I really can't find a good use for it. The proccessor and ram are 1/2 of my iPod's....


Are you, like me, just addicted to fixing things? =D
 
Sounds cool. I just fixed up a 165c powerbook from '93. Similar to your model. Mine won't work if the battery is in. Try plugging into an external power source w/o battery.
 
iwhillenbrand said:
Sounds cool. I just fixed up a 165c powerbook from '93. Similar to your model. Mine won't work if the battery is in. Try plugging into an external power source w/o battery. You also may need 6.0.8, not 6.0.1. I upgraded the powerbook 165c to 7.6.1 from 7.1. idk if this helps, but good luck anyway.
Click to expand...

According to the Everymac.com link I posted earlier and this Apple page, the eariliest supported OS is 7.0.1.
 
This all started because I am finally trying to bring over all my old files that on floppys, some of which are so old they are on single density disks, so I need a computer with an old floppy drive to read them (haven't figured out the claris works issue of it all yet.)

If this doesnt work I might go looking for a G3 Powerbook or maybe an early PPC Powerbook. Anybody have any advice on that?

This was the reason I tried System 6:

http://www.open.ou.nl//psl/pb100/#Software

"Some users install System 6 to save memory and gain speed, particularly with smaller PB100s. System 6.0.8L was released specifically for the PB100; it is the recommended version if you want to use System 6 on the PB100, which you really should if you own one of the earliest 2 Mb/20 Mb PB100s (see the ReadMe). You may download it from here. It comes as two disk images: system start up and system additions, about 1 Mb each. They come as self extracting archives. Double clicking the .sea files will produce the disk images that you may subsequently transfer to two high density floppies. Dragging seems to work, you do not need Disk Copy. Other versions of System 6 seem to work, but Apple doesn't guarantee it! Even if MacOS 8 would fit on your PB100's HD, it would neither load in its RAM, nor run on its 68000 processor!"
 
Hi mike i still think the issue is that you haven't formatted the floppy disk to whatever file format apple used in system 7 days (i think it's HFS but i'm really not sure)
 
Moel,

So you're talking about how the disks are actually formatted, not the capacity? I wondered about that, because it appears that OSX Disk Utility can not format a disk in the correct format of Classic OS. Do you know if this is correct, and if so, how I can accomplish this? Do I need to find a computer running Classic and use Disk Copy?


Thanks for everyone's help on this.
 
mikejtl said:
Moel,

So you're talking about how the disks are actually formatted, not the capacity? I wondered about that, because it appears that OSX Disk Utility can not format a disk in the correct format of Classic OS. Do you know if this is correct, and if so, how I can accomplish this? Do I need to find a computer running Classic and use Disk Copy?


Thanks for everyone's help on this.
Click to expand...

LowEndMac.com - Creating Classic Mac Boot Floppies in OS X
 
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