Hey guys,
I've a Kanga/3500/original PowerBook G3, and it refuses to boot.
It started having issues a year or so ago, so I started transferring the data from the hard drive and at some point, it locked up completely. I did a soft reboot (ctrl-cmd-power), it chimed, and then it sat there blankly.
I decided to try to fix it recently using a spare charge card that I had in storage (since this seems like a power issue). However, a replacement charge card did nothing: it still won't power up.
What it does:
When pressing the power button (or, since the PRAM battery is disconnected, when power is applied), the machine chimes, and then it sits there. The CAPS LOCK light will respond, but nothing else will: the hard drive never spins, the expansion drives never attempt initialization (the CDROM would usually whirr, or the floppy would make some kind of brief noise), the display never illuminates. It does respond to a soft reboot, to the same effect. Only once in a multitude of soft resets did it ultimately produce the broken glass sound following the startup chime.
What reliably happens is that the speakers make a low hissing sound that will change a bit after 5-10 seconds following power up.
I've tried removing everything, including the internal display and combo modem/Ethernet card, before attempting to boot, and still it never does anything after the initial chime.
Since I seem to be at a loss and don't seem to have anything to lose, I may try to reflow the major BGA chips on the logic board (other than the CPU, which I'm not touching, that would be the graphics controller and the two VLSI-made chips) to see if that helps anything. I'm not sure it's a system RAM failure, since the display usually lights and goes gray during the full RAM test. The Apple Tech Info pretty much says "replace logic board" at this point, but since the Kanga isn't exactly a common beast, I'll probably just reassemble it and put it aside until I can get a donor. Maybe I'll use the case parts to resurrect a scruffy 3400c/240 that I was going to cannibalize.
Any thoughts?
I've a Kanga/3500/original PowerBook G3, and it refuses to boot.
It started having issues a year or so ago, so I started transferring the data from the hard drive and at some point, it locked up completely. I did a soft reboot (ctrl-cmd-power), it chimed, and then it sat there blankly.
I decided to try to fix it recently using a spare charge card that I had in storage (since this seems like a power issue). However, a replacement charge card did nothing: it still won't power up.
What it does:
When pressing the power button (or, since the PRAM battery is disconnected, when power is applied), the machine chimes, and then it sits there. The CAPS LOCK light will respond, but nothing else will: the hard drive never spins, the expansion drives never attempt initialization (the CDROM would usually whirr, or the floppy would make some kind of brief noise), the display never illuminates. It does respond to a soft reboot, to the same effect. Only once in a multitude of soft resets did it ultimately produce the broken glass sound following the startup chime.
What reliably happens is that the speakers make a low hissing sound that will change a bit after 5-10 seconds following power up.
I've tried removing everything, including the internal display and combo modem/Ethernet card, before attempting to boot, and still it never does anything after the initial chime.
Since I seem to be at a loss and don't seem to have anything to lose, I may try to reflow the major BGA chips on the logic board (other than the CPU, which I'm not touching, that would be the graphics controller and the two VLSI-made chips) to see if that helps anything. I'm not sure it's a system RAM failure, since the display usually lights and goes gray during the full RAM test. The Apple Tech Info pretty much says "replace logic board" at this point, but since the Kanga isn't exactly a common beast, I'll probably just reassemble it and put it aside until I can get a donor. Maybe I'll use the case parts to resurrect a scruffy 3400c/240 that I was going to cannibalize.
Any thoughts?
