Floofies
Maker of Logos
This has not been a good month for me. First my poor cat Linus is hit and killed by a car last week, and now the Q950 I picked up from our dear Nuvision has died! This Quadra 950, a workhorse at Nuvision Graphics for who knows how many years, is now giving no signs of life, and I don't know why.
It all started when I first received the machine from Nuvision a few months ago. The front of the machine had a label on it which read "BOOTS (NEEDS WORK)", so I knew things would be interesting. When I first set it up, it was not booting due to the format of the HDD, also indicated by that label on the front. Attempting to boot into both 7.6 and 8.0 install CDs, I kept getting bus errors; indicated by both a bomb message and SadMac 000F 0001. I popped in a SCSI2SD and after a few attempts to boot, it eventually started working. I had no clue why.
It's been a few months since I booted it, and I've moved to a new house, and when I dragged the machine out of the closet a few days ago it worked fine. Then I ordered an Asante MCNB Rev.A NuBus card for the machine, and inserted it yesterday. I got a boot chime, but no video, and eventually death chimes. I removed the ethernet card hoping it would boot, but it wouldn't. After a few power cycles, it began to boot off the SCSI2SD, but when the Mac OS splash screen appeared, I got that "bus error" bomb quite a few times, and a single "illegal instruction" bomb thrown in there as well. Thinking there must be a bad SCSI cable or that the SCSI2SD may have died, I removed them and attempted to boot off the DB25 SCSI port using a CD drive, but kept getting bus errors.
After a few more boot attempts, it was just a boot chime followed by a death chime after the RAM test finished, and a couple power cycles later absolutely no signs of life. At around that time I was starting to realize that I would have to gut the machine to troubleshoot. I wound up removing everything: floppy drive, PPC 601 card, a PowerPump overclock kit, and 128MB of RAM, all to no avail. I don't know if the Asante card killed the board, or if the history of bus errors indicates some other issue. I might get an oscilloscope so I can probe the 040 and NuBus hardware to see what's working and what's not.
It all started when I first received the machine from Nuvision a few months ago. The front of the machine had a label on it which read "BOOTS (NEEDS WORK)", so I knew things would be interesting. When I first set it up, it was not booting due to the format of the HDD, also indicated by that label on the front. Attempting to boot into both 7.6 and 8.0 install CDs, I kept getting bus errors; indicated by both a bomb message and SadMac 000F 0001. I popped in a SCSI2SD and after a few attempts to boot, it eventually started working. I had no clue why.
It's been a few months since I booted it, and I've moved to a new house, and when I dragged the machine out of the closet a few days ago it worked fine. Then I ordered an Asante MCNB Rev.A NuBus card for the machine, and inserted it yesterday. I got a boot chime, but no video, and eventually death chimes. I removed the ethernet card hoping it would boot, but it wouldn't. After a few power cycles, it began to boot off the SCSI2SD, but when the Mac OS splash screen appeared, I got that "bus error" bomb quite a few times, and a single "illegal instruction" bomb thrown in there as well. Thinking there must be a bad SCSI cable or that the SCSI2SD may have died, I removed them and attempted to boot off the DB25 SCSI port using a CD drive, but kept getting bus errors.
After a few more boot attempts, it was just a boot chime followed by a death chime after the RAM test finished, and a couple power cycles later absolutely no signs of life. At around that time I was starting to realize that I would have to gut the machine to troubleshoot. I wound up removing everything: floppy drive, PPC 601 card, a PowerPump overclock kit, and 128MB of RAM, all to no avail. I don't know if the Asante card killed the board, or if the history of bus errors indicates some other issue. I might get an oscilloscope so I can probe the 040 and NuBus hardware to see what's working and what's not.