PDQ Hard Drive Problem

[Strimkind]

I bought a PDQ on ebay for $5 plus shipping.

It works fine except for one thing. After a short time of use, the internal drive will startup and do a self-check, and then power down. It will repeat this issue and it will not boot from CD while it does this. Last time it just eventually turned itself off.

I have changed the hard drive cage just in case the circuitry on it were at fault but it did not change anything. Does anyone have any ideas on what would cause this? I have reset the pram but it didn't do anything other than run the fan at full speed.

Thoughts?

 

[beachycove]

Is there a Finder message?

 

[Strimkind]

Nope. When it does boot, it works fine, but when this issue happends it will not even startup...just sits on the '?'

 

[beachycove]

Well, it sounds to me very much like a death in the family.

However, there are some remote possibilities that occur to me in passing:

1. Backup battery/ glod-like issues (has it been left plugged in for a while to soak up some juice?)

2. I suppose you could check whether it exhibits the same problems with no optical drive in the bay, or with a known-good one; and/or

3. Check the Master/Slave setting on the optical as well as the hard drive

4. Bad RAM?

I say #1 because the backup battery can cause all sorts of anomalies in some PowerBooks (though my Wallstreet 266 has been very solid over the years despite a dead backup battery, there are in fact several "Wallstreets" and they are not all the same machine). I say #2 because I had a Pismo that would boot only with no CD/DVD drive installed, and it did not matter what was set to Master or to slave, or what good optical drive was inserted (I had a couple to test it with), it just would not boot. It was as if there was some sort of corruption on the bus. It eventually was stripped for parts, and thus it gave up its very nice LCD to replace a failing (pink-hued) and scratched one in my main working Pismo. #3 is unlikely to be the problem, but if these were set wrong it would likely be a problem. #4 is perhaps a long shot, but bad RAM can cause all sorts of bizzaroid effects.

Best of luck rehabilitating it. I have a couple of spare logic boards, but they are for the 233 with the passive matrix screen only.