180c White Screen of Death

[Scott Baret]

I returned home to my old 180c over the holiday and figured I'd get a few files off it before heading home. (I would take it, but I flew home and plan to take a Vaio as my second carry on).

The laptop worked fine at first. I got a floppy worth of data from it and then went to get another disk. This disk was a DOS preformat and since I don't have PC Exchange on the 180c, I reformatted it for Mac. When it got to "creating directory", the Mac froze.

Now the computer won't start up. It won't chime. The hard drive can be heard spinning up, but the computer itself freezes on a solid white screen. I have tried with the power adapter, from the battery (which does work), and have used the reset switch a few times. I even used the old PRAM zapping combo.

Any ideas? I do have another 180c I could swap the hard drive into but I left all my tools down south!

 

[Macdrone]

capacitors in it may or are on the way out. May have a chance by pulling the battery and power plug hit power button to discharge what left let it set and then retry tomorrow when its all cooled off. If you had a keyboard mouse and the video cable that would be good to startup without the built in screen as most of the capacitors except the battery area go to the screen, keyboard and trackpad board.

Good Luck.

 

[techknight]

ouch. sounds like you lost a chip somewhere, or maybe a voltage regulator.

Process of elimination:

Time to break out the scope and find out if there is bus activity, and if you still have clock pulses at the proper spots on each chip. See if the ROM is getting called up for access.

Usually a hard freeze means that the system stopped responding to interrupts, and/or other chips stopped receiving control signals. Judging the fact that the screen stayed on during the freeze until you cut the power, That tells me the video ASICs and associated circuitry is ok, and that the system clock is still present and voltages are present within those circuits, or the LCD would have "etchasketched" away when it froze.

Problem goes back to the CPU and/or its memory controller. Something halted the bus/stopped the CPU from responding to interrupts. And since it doesnt boot, that means the CPU/system bus, or something on it is faulty.

 

[James1095]

I've seen a bad RAM module cause a similar problem. It may well not be the problem here, but it's a relatively easy thing to check. Pop it out and see if symptoms change. Also I agree about the caps. I don't know if those machines had any SMT electrolytics, but if they do, it's a prime suspect.

 

[Macdrone]

There are caps in the screen, when I took apart my 160 there was goo drooling all over. I need to try and recap it as the other 100 series are slowly taking longer to stabilize. There are some caps on the inveter board that goes to everything also.

 

[mcdermd]

I hate those little guys in the screen. They're a pain in the rear to rework on those flimsy boards they're attached to.

 

[CelGen]

180c's have a chip that self-destructs. To date there's no known way to prevent it and onve it's blown there is no replacement.

That issue however seems to completely kill the powerbook though. Try a recap first.

 

[mcdermd]

8-o Only the 180c or does it effect the 165c also?

 

[uniserver]

180c's have a chip that self-destructs. To date there's no known way to prevent it and onve it's blown there is no replacement.That issue however seems to completely kill the powerbook though. Try a recap first.

Come on, Let's see some documentation to back this up.

 

[James1095]

180c's have a chip that self-destructs. To date there's no known way to prevent it and onve it's blown there is no replacement.That issue however seems to completely kill the powerbook though. Try a recap first.

What is the chip and what function(s) does it perform, other than make the computer work?

 

[CelGen]

I'm going to retract that actually as Google isn't giving me anyone else who had this. It could just be exaggerated from the person I heard it from two years ago...or my memory is failing me.

Anyways, yeah, try a recap.