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7100/80AV Clown-Car-Funny-Crash

uridium

Well-known member
G'day,

I've managed to score a quite beaten up 7100/80AV I want for a project.

I've given it a good clean and it doesn't appear to have any leaking caps. I'm half tempted to just re-cap the thing for good measure as I've had to do with a few of my older systems.

Anyway, it fires up, gives the lovely 7100 chime, the LCD is plugged into the AV video card off a dip-switch converter (I've exhaustively tried all combo's purely for giggles), and fed it a keyboard.

I've divide and conquered the ram, replaced it all. Removed the HDD, checked termination and fed it the 7.6.1 cd and held C.

No screen output, just chimes and after a pause gives the clown-car crash sound.

Does anyone have any pointers? :)

Thanks!

Al

 

MJ313

Well-known member
Have you tried booting it without the LCD attached? To eliminate that as the issue?  I had that issue when connecting an LCD to my Q700. They just didn't like each other. Obviously far from being the same machine, but really easy to test... just detach lol. If it still 'crashes' without the LCD attached, then maybe a RAM issue.

 
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ArmorAlley

Well-known member
The 7100 has the funny DVI-like all-in-one port designed for the AppleVision monitor. ADB, the graphics signal probably power too all go through it. My 8100 has an adapter that allows me to plug in a normal DB-15 monitor cable to it. Get a hold of this adaptor, if you don't already have it, and try plugging your monitor into that. If you don't have one, I've one one spare somewhere.

Another idea: do you have any NuBus cards? If so, try these.

I'd give your mobo a recapping anyway. It's 21 years'old now. It'll need recapping sooner rather than later. How's the PRAM battery btw? You might replacing it.

 

trag

Well-known member
The two most common failures in the 7100 are dried out heat sink grease and cracked CPU chips. So, if you have not already, pull the heat sink (carefully, gently, don't cause number 2) and clean off the old dried powdery heat sink compound. If it isn't old, dried and powdery, then someone did some maintenance at some point.

Check the CPU for cracks in the plastic around the metal die in the center. Then, if not cracked, apply new heat sink grease. Just use a small dab. It is only meant to fill the imperfections between the flat mated surfaces. If it runs off onto the pins it can cause shorts and damage your logic board. The grease only goes on the metal die, not the surrounding plastic.

It is possible that your CPU IS overheating as soon as it finishes POST although it seems unlikely. Next most likely is probably bad RAM, although I think a badly cofigured SCSI bus can also cause this. Have you tried booting with all cables except power and speaker disconnected and all RAM and cache removed?

Oh, and PDS termination. The PDS slot must be terminated. If there is not a video card in the slot it needs a PDS termination card.

 
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uridium

Well-known member
Hi Guys,

Will try all of this in a little while. Thanks :)

I'm currently trying to use video off the PDS slot because I've not yet got a AV-DVI-Womble-Connector<->DVI cable yet (Got one off fleabay recently but it's in transit via a goat-track somewhere out back of siberia it seems).. I've tried it without the LCD and it still gives a crash sound.

I've also swapped all the memory with known good. Should be able to remove the ram and just run off the 8mb onboard? Suspect so.

I'll check the CPU. I've got plenty of thermal spooge.

Thanks guys :) Really appreciate it.

 

uridium

Well-known member
Just to report back. I've re-greased the CPU and re-capped the board. It all came straight up. Baring issues with the floppy drive, it's honking. :)

Thanks guys, :b&w:

 

uridium

Well-known member
So. Picked up a 400mhz Crescendo to replace the 180mhz 603e.

Very keen for it to arrive from fleabay. Am I going to be able to just drop this thing in and go, or will it need a fist full of enablers? :)

Thanks in advance.

 

ArmorAlley

Well-known member
I have one of those in my 8100/80. It takes longer to start up but it is nice. It is the fastest System 7.1 that I know off (except maybe the 500MHz variant). I read somewhere that the 400MHz processor is better handled because the ratio of clock-speed to CPU-speed is 1:10, which seems to be at the upper end of acceptable performance, while the 1:12 ratio with the 500mHz is a bit too much. I have tested it so I can't speak from experience.

 

uridium

Well-known member
Well.. it arrived today so wish me luck getting it rolling :) Thanks armour alley. Really looking forward to it.

On another note, I can still boot the thing up off the internal HDD, but for the life of me I can't get the CDROM to boot anything. I'm hoping ideally to get 7.6.1 on it. Currently it's got an 8.6 install. The 8.6 install refuses to mount a CDROM (Even when I burn several MacGarden CD's). I've tried five different physical CD drives with a variety of SCSI ID and parity and blocksize jumpers and none mount or boot. When I use FWB drive tools, all the drives (Including the dinky Apple 300i cdrom) report as "Not Ready".

I suspect I'm doing something silly. Anyone seen this?

 

ArmorAlley

Well-known member
Hi uridium,

Does the CD-drive in question work normally? A tool like SCSI Probe will tell you if the SCSI-bus is not terminated.

Get yourself the small extension 'CD Sunrise 2.2'. This mounts just about any volume albeit a read-only volume.

I work through these problems methodically: do you have known working SCSI-devices that work and are mounted on the bus? If so, you know that the bus and the cable are in order. You are dealing with a 22-year-old machine. These things should not be taken for granted. Do you have an external drive into which you could out your CD-drive? Does external termination make a difference? Are you sure that drive is getting enough power?

There are various packages that supply drivers for CD-drives: FWB CD-Toolkit comes to mind, but the Apple 300i should be loaded straight away as long as the Apple CD-ROM extension is present.

BTW (on a. different note), did you get a driver for your Sonnet Crescendo 400MHz G3 accelerator card? I have the installer around somewhere, if you need it.

 

uridium

Well-known member
Hi Armour!

Sorry for the lag. It ended up being SCSI cable merstly. I've swapped it and it's still being odd from time to time, but is working far more reliably with a SCSI dvd drive I liberated from one of my older sun 280R's before I retired them. That seems happy'ish.

Anyone know a source for the install disk/patch disk drivers for the Sonnet Crescendo Nubus G3 400's?

Got it in and the AV card working via the flow-through. System profiler says that it's still running an 80mhz 601PPC and benchmarks seem to confirm it's no quicker. The support site seems to only have manuals but no .smi of the driver and patch disk mentioned in the manual.

Ideas?

Thanks in advance :)

 

uridium

Well-known member
P.S. Also .. the other cable is *VERY* susceptible to my Ham radio when I'm on 2m band which fits because the cables a little under 1m long which is frankly a perfect half-wave for 147.000Mhz so it'd work ideally as a resonant antenna.

That was the other tip. Put the case on the machine or just don't TX. Heh.

 

uridium

Well-known member
\e/!!! :b&w:

Found a copy in the garden.org. Woh. 400mhz G3 in the 7100/80AV. In Speed-O, math went from 143.37 -> 1101.8 womble marks. K Wheatstones went from 155.49 to 881.83 and the aggregate CPU Womble mark went from 4.18 to 29.27 wombles.

That's a massive improvement.

What a crying pity Sonnet didn't make the card a double height or rear daughter-board with a nice SDRAM slot on it for some local FAST-RAM action to get the old girl up over 136mb. You'd still need global memory for DMA etc, but some local fast ram would've rocked.

Still! Love it!

Fun ensues! :>

 

uridium

Well-known member
Okay, so thanks for the pointers and PM's. I've not got old-mate running nicely.

For giggles, I've benchmarked the machine at 80mhz with the stock PPC601, then again once the Sonnet Crescendo is running and configured on 7.6.1. Accel is on the left. Non-Accel on the right.

I had to re-touch the solder pads on the pass-through video card and run two bypass leads.

Works now!

I think it's worth it. It's a marginal improvement . Probably worth the upgrade. :)

7100AV-bench.png

 
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