PowerCenter 120, chime with no video no boot

[danpoarch]

I got a powerCenter off of eBay that has a MaxPower CPU in it. When I power it on I hear a chime but I don’t see any video (LCD or CRT) and I don’t hear the hard drive chirp away. Haven’t tested the hard drive because I get no video even when I disconnect it. Reseating the CPU, cache, RAM and ROM have had no effect. And well, it chimes, so those should work. It responds Ctrl-OpenApple-Reset, but doesn’t seem to respond to Opt-OpenApple-P-R...

Any ideas? It’s been months since I bought it so no bother asking the seller anything. And honestly, they won’t know so I’m not going that route.

 

[danpoarch]

Still chimes. No video.

I put a jumper on the VGA enable pins and switched to pure VGA video and still no image on-screen. Odd that it chimes but no clicky from the hard drive(which spins up) and no video. Not sure I'll continue to test this and may just sell it. Bought it to put one of my Stargate cards into. If it's this much trouble I don't want to test another unknown like a Stargate with it.

 

[danpoarch]

Received a note from another forum member and they recommended removing the cache, as that solved this same problem for the recently. This did not work for me. I'm off to the Trading Post to give this away.

 

[ScarletSwordfish]

I hope it's okay to bring this topic back up, I recently got a PowerCenter Pro 180 that has the exact same symptoms as described above - it will power on and chime, but there will be no video output. I've dried a Dell VGA LCD monitor and a Macintosh 16" color display. I pressed the CUDA reset switch, that did not help. I put in a fresh PRAM battery. I also tried pressing Cmd-Opt-P-R but nothing happened - it did not reset like it should when zapping the PRAM. Does anyone have any ideas of what to do next to try to diagnose the problem?

 

[MJ313]

I have the same machine you do. I removed the cache module and that fixed it for me; I think they go bad for some reason. Good luck!

 

[_AP]

I'm having the same problem. I've tried a power computing monitor, and older dell LCD.

I've tried:
VGA/DB15->VGA
New PRAM battery.
Re-seating/cleaning contacts of cards, cpu, memory.
CUDA resets.
Original CPU and newer tech upgrade.
Removing cache card and trying different memory configs.
PRAM reset with keyboard.

I have tried these same things on:
2 PowerCenter Pro minitowers
1 PowerCenter Pro desktop
1 PowerTower Pro
1 PowerBase 180

No visible problems with capacitors. No corrosion anywhere. None of them have hard drives in them, but when I picked them up and tested them beforehand, most of them had drives in them had same results.

 

[_AP]

Moved post here since it's more recent.

 

[ppcoutlaw]

I own a few Power Computing models as well, but have not yet powered any up, so this is of interest to me.
However, something occurred to me. If you cannot display video out, check to see if there is any vram. No vram most likely will result in no video. Or it could even be faulty vram .
Failing that, if you have a twin turbo video card or other compatible pci video card, pop it in and see if you can get video up.
As far as the hard drive not spinning up, maybe it has to wait until video comes on.

 

[_AP]

I will check the VRAM. The PowerTower has the twin turbo, and I have a few other models. None of them work, which is strange to me. I will check the battery too, and see if I got DOA ones.

I also have a very clean riser card that the guy I picked these up from with graphics built in. I will try that too. A few spare power supplies also, but the whole thing is weird to me because I'd expect at least one to have some sort of video output. I also have a few 4400s with the same issues, but a couple had batteries leak so I would expect such a thing.

 

[imactheknife]

All my power towers had bad caches. Exactly the same symptoms too. Pulled cache, all. Good to go

 

[_AP]

I tried that. One thing I will try now is a different brand of battery. I saw a lot of reviews about the EBL ones having the right voltage, but not when under load.