PM 8600/200 Startup Annoyance

[Tango Niner]

Hi all,

Been having the following problem for a few months now. Prior to that, I had no startup issues.

Here's my procedure to get my PowerMac 8600/200 up and running:

1) Hit soft Power button on keyboard.

2) Hear normal startup chime and HDD/fan spinup.

3) Watch as nothing, I mean nothing, comes up on the monitor.

4) Roll eyes, wait 5-10 seconds just to be sure that nothing's happening.

5) Hit CMD-CTRL-Power on keyboard.

6) Normal startup chime, monitor wakes up and a normal startup ensues.

I've tried doing CMD-CTRL-Power at step 1, but nothing changes.

PRAM battery is only a year old or so.

Any thoughts / fixes / suggestions?

Cheers,

T9

 

[Byrd]

Disable startup memory tests - hold down command + option while double clicking the Memory Control Panel, there will be a check box.  Also reset PRAM.

 

[Tango Niner]

Thanks Byrd, but still troubleshooting.

I zapped the PRAM, no help there; and I tried to disable the startup memory tests, but as I recall that might be an option only on "later" vintage Mac OS'es? I tried it under both 8.1 and 7.5.5 and no checkbox appeared. I don't have any later OS's installed on the machine at the moment.

During the startup memory test, don't you at least see the "clean sheet of gray" pixels on the screen? I don't even see that. I just get the chime & the HDD & fan spinup. The monitor doesn't even wake up.

 

[pb3623]

I have this problem on a Quadra 700... and it comes up from time to time, which is why I suspect a flaky video card but it seemed like I was able to truly zap the PRAM by using TechTool - for some reason it appears to be a more complete zap or complete wipe of that space vs. maybe a less aggressive version built into the boot ROM (Cmd+Opt+P+R). I also have this problem on a beige G3 (no video) where I think it's still doing the memory test but I'll actually hear the system beep I hear when it either hasn't shut down cleanly or it's auto-mounted a network share. But Open Firmware has a different course of action, I was just sharing possible causes.

Try TechTool to zap and restart? You can even save to a file and restore, not that there's anything to save if you've already trying zapping via keyboard (and it would probably restore any corruption anyway)

 

[Tango Niner]

I'll try that pb, thanks. On my PRAM reset attempt I did indeed use CMD-OPT-P-R. Pretty sure I have TechTool floating around somewhere.

 

[AlpineRaven]

Have you got any PCI Cards in it?

My 8600 does that sometimes - It will boot at 2nd cycle power on and I think its the SCSI card I have in it that needs to be woken up/powered up.
Cheers

AP

 

[Tango Niner]

It has both ZIP and JAZ drives installed. I'll try unhooking those, thanks for the tip!

 

[Zippy Zapp]

Did you find a solution to this?  I have a PowerMac G3 Beige tower that does the same thing.  It always takes the 3 finger reset after first power on to startup and then it works fine.  This one came to me with battery damage that I repaired.  This G3 also has an aftermarket ZIF CPU upgrade that I have not yet identified.  It has a rotary switch, and I don't have an original 266mhz CPU to test it.