• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

PowerBook 180 is wildly unstable

Baldung99

Member
title, basically!

The thing just doesn't seem to want to work for more than a few minutes at the time. Error type 10 and error type 28 seem to be the most common - when the thing bothers to display a code and not just a blank error window.

It has a 4MB memory expansion.

I'm using a RaSCSI (powerbook edition) to boot off of.

Now the first question is, how do I troubleshoot this damn thing? The instability stays regardless if I've got the memory upgrade board installed, or boot without extensions.

The second question is, can I just solder a DB25 SCSI connector to the RaSCSI and attempt to boot using the external SCSI connector? I've got a cable coming up soon(tm) so I want to try that too.
 

Spode

Active member
I found "Snooper" to be a useful tool as it can do a bunch of hardware diagnostics.

I also made a bootable floppy disk that uses a RAMDisk. That way I can boot from this disk and then remove the floppy disk. This allows me to insert the disk with Snooper on and run the tests. The nice thing about this is it removes the hard drive (in your case RaSCSI) from the equation in your testing.

I had a machine here unstable and the issue turned out to be the memory expansion.
 

landoGriffin

Well-known member
Now the first question is, how do I troubleshoot this damn thing? The instability stays regardless if I've got the memory upgrade board installed, or boot without extensions.
Any chance the Pi is overheating? Why type of Raspberry Pi are you using? I haven't tried using the new Pi Zero W 2 inside a powerbook, so not sure how hot it will get.

The second question is, can I just solder a DB25 SCSI connector to the RaSCSI and attempt to boot using the external SCSI connector? I've got a cable coming up soon(tm) so I want to try that too.
Ya, you can do that. Or, if you want, I have a PCB that will allow you to adapt the PB SCSI connector to a DB-25. If you solder a DB25 connector to your board, its going to be a pain to get it back off.
 
Top