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Hi all! Summer is finally here, so ferrix has had some time to work on the portable. You'll find the pictures of the cable he made attached to this post.  However, we still have two major problems here: When the display is plugged in, the system doesn't even attempt to boot - we think there...

I have one of these upgrades, but unfortunately the display cable has been torn apart. :( At the moment it's in Ferrix's hands to get it back to work. Since I live in Europe, though, it'd be a little difficult to lend you mine, you'd probably be better served if someone a little closer to you...

Yep, DC-DC board is specific to the PowerBook 5300... Unfortunately the 190 has got the power circuitry directly on the logic board. I'm not sure what could be wrong there except maybe a broken trace somewhere. I'll see if I can find a way to check the power supply, but I'm more keen to suspect...

The acetone+alcool combination seems to have produced some effect, but I'm not sure if this is to be interpreted as a positive progress or a bad sign. Apparently, the system now *seems* to try a boot: it chirps rhythmically and sometimes lights up the screen accordingly to the rhythm, however...

Finally had some time to look at this boy.  I tried Elfen's suggestion and scrubbed the board with alcool and a toothbrush, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference. I also cleaned the internal structure just in case, but to no avail. The symptoms are pretty much the same: if I plug the...

A brief update: today I had the chance to get it apart. I can't see major damage to the logic board, however the battery acid has destroyed one of the battery contacts and also seems to have spread to a few resistors in the power supply circuit area. Nothing else seems affected. Perhaps a trace...

Great score for that price! It's always nice, in my opinion, to save a little Macintosh from doom. :)

Awesome information! I had initially thought about this, but I had just supposed that it was soldered and thus the only viable way of getting data out of it was running a BIOS dumper.  Keep us updated on your progress with this!

That's something I'd definitely look into. Not specifically to run a different operating system, but because Windows and DOS have plenty of utilities to dump the BIOS of a machine, while I don't think OS X has any (because it doesn't use BIOS at all). It'd be interesting to look at it and see...

Thanks haplain! It's supposed to be build 8F1111. It was once very popular, but like almost every torrent I know, it died many years ago. Back then, I don't think people saw the historical value of keeping a copy of that file, it was only used for hacking.

Unfortunately, 10.4.1 is extremely finicky regarding the supported hardware: the Intel GMA900 and GMA950 chips are effectively the only GPUs supported with graphics acceleration.  It's also important to point out that 10.4.1 doesn't support the final revision of the Intel binary format that...

Thanks for all the suggestions! I think I'm going to have a look at it this friday, I'll keep you updated with my findings!

Nice haul! You could try and save that MacBook Pro with a reflow, probably (and since it's already damaged, it won't hurt anyway).

I think if you really want to push it, you can put 10.6 on it (provided you appropriately patch it), but you'll likely need a modernish GPU to get it working!

Thanks Elfen!  Next week I'll have an exam break at university, so I hope I'll have a couple of days to give this little boy some care. Seems like a reasonably easy fix, at least I hope so! 

Hi folks, it's me again! My usual "luck" has brought me a PowerBook 190 in mint condition that was supposed to be working, but actually it isn't. Let me explain. I found this PowerBook on eBay Germany a couple of weeks ago, the pictures showed it was working and it was cheap enough that I...

Just wanted to chime in and say that what you're doing is marvelous!  Just the fact that you're hosting everything on a Quadra 610 (with 2TB hard drive!!) running NetBSD on a 68040 (unless you have some accelerator in it?) is simply stunning!

That's exactly the problem I see with this kind of accelerators. I'm not really an expert, but if I recall correctly most (if not all) 68k Macs derive all their clock signals from a single oscillator that controls the CPU, the bus speed and possibly the video signal refresh rate. You can't just...

I just love this kind of things :) Congratulations for the haul!

That's SO cool! :D It's a total bargain, let us know when you have updates!