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This Power Macintosh 7200 Makes Me Want To Commit Suicide.

M

Mike Richardson

Banned
68030
I am at wits end.

I started maybe around 8 PM. It is now 5 AM. I have not slept. I have not showered.

I have been attempting to install Mac OS 9 onto this machine for the past 9 god damn hours.

The errors are varied and plentiful. The earliest such one is that we can't find, or can't open, or otherwise use the magical and illustrious "Installation Tome". When I put the CD into my G5 and run the installer in classic mode, it can make a full install of OS 9 with no problem. Put it in the 7200 and for some reason Mr. Installation Tome vanishes. F*** you, Installation Tome.

I ripped the disc and burned another copy of it. Still the same error. So I ripped the disc on the 7200 using Disk Copy booted off a ZIP disk, and then installed from the freaking disk image. No installation tome. So I ripped out the 8x drive and put a 24x drive. HOLY S*** THE INSTALLATION TOME WORKS OMFG ITS THE END OF THE WORLD. WTF.

OMFG OS 9 ACTUALLY INSTALLED. Let's reboot. FREEZE. No extensions, boots fine. Boot it again with extensions - fine, what the f***????? Put in a CD. FREEZE. Eject the cd - it goddamn unfreezes! Rip out the 24x and put in the 8x - NO MORE FREEZING. Let's run the OS 9.1 update. Type -199 error. F*** that. Let's try a different disc. Yeah, it runs, and installs halfway, and then decides it can't find the folder named "Mac OS 9". Reboot. Freeze. Reboot again. No freeze WTF????? Copy the 9.1 update to the hard drive. ERROR -127 WTF. Reboot and copy again. No error. It starts to copy. It's almost done. Almost there. THE WHOLE THING CRASHES TO A BLANK SCREEN WITH A BLANK MENU BAR AND I WANT TO KILL MYSELF.

I have already ripped out every PCI card including the Sonnet card, I ripped out the cache, I ripped out all the RAM except for one 128 MB stick and yes it's the right refresh and it's the right stick and it worked fine in a 7300 and yes it's not EDO so why the goddamn bloody f***ing hell will this 7200 not cooperate with me. I checked the media of the hard drive. It's a 1.2 GB SCSI drive. The media is fine. I tried taking off the scsi zip drive. it made no difference.

I want to grind up the 7200 motherboard into a fine powder and snort it. Then I want to crush the case with a steamroller and then burn the pieces and then snort that too.

I want to cry now. What a night of pure hell.

I just don't understand why this machine is so absolutely positively f***ed up.

 
OK. What you need first is commiseration from those who have also been there, done that, survived, and either triumphed or moved on. So, commiserations, then. Without being able, at this remove, to have any definitive opinion about the specific cause, I observe that what you describe fits the picture of a flakey MLB. You may never get a specific diagnosis, but the principle of test by replacement that you have employed in this affair is suggested for the main board also. If another board works ...

I was recently driven to the conclusion that the SCSI port (What? SCSI never fails!) of a IIci MLB had died, but not before quite a bit of argey-bargey. Best of fortune hereafter.

de

 
I decided to take the hard drive out of the stripped 7500 and put it in the 7200. The old 7200 drive is removed. Now I'm installing OS 9 on top of the OS 8.1 install rather than doing a wipe and install. The G3 card works at this point with the OS 8.1, but the G3 card works best with the OS 9.1 where it can use graphics acceleration and it boots a lot faster and such.

 
To me, it sounds like somewhere along the way someone did stick EDO into the machine, and it's borked its memory controller - and you're getting random intermittent errors of all kinds, everywhere.

I think your idea of grinding up the 7200's motherboard into a fine powder is a good idea. Maybe not the snorting. Save much much hassle!

Still - you did the best you could, and came out with wasted time - it does happen!.

Can you get pics or video if you set the logic board on fire?

Dana

 
Wow - not much I could say would top that. I, too, have had moments where I wanted nothing more than to introduce the offending object to Mr. Sledgehammer (several items met their fate in that way, actually, though usually just uncooperative drives). Never had the desire to snort ground-up circuit boards, tho.

As for advice? Put that thing somewhere that you will not think about it for at least a week, and then if you decide later that you want to try again, take it slow. Check the hardware for the usual problems (leaking capacitors, loose/corroded contacts or wires, excessive dust, bridged traces, etc). It sounds like the vast majority of your problems have to do with CDROM operations. Old optical drives have a habit of being uncooperative, so if you have lots of media errors, try using a few different drives. As I've said before, Matsushita-manufactured drives often cause me more grief than anything else, and if I'm having CD read errors, the first thing I look at is the drive manufacturer. If it's Matsushita, it's gone. I have a few non-Apple TEAC or Pioneer drives that work exceptionally well, so they're my workhorses.

I don't think there's anything else to say on this one - if you do decide to go Office Space that computer, be sure to wear safety goggles and preferably wear gloves.

 
I'm giving it one more try. It may have been the hard drive. If it was screwed up it may have been sending all kinds of crap all over the SCSI bus which would explain a lot of the problems. Magically, when I put in the other hard drive, the onboard ethernet started working correctly again. It's downloading at almost 250K/sec right now (Mac OS 9.1 update). I'll run the update, and then the sonnet G3 software, and we'll see how it fares.

Edit: All the CD drives so far have been MATSUSHITA drives, but I have at least one Apple SONY 4x drive I could try if necessary.

If it was the hard drive then I will make a nice video of the hard drive getting what it deserves }:)

 
Well, it froze on the OS 9.1 update. Right in the middle. Now the install is trashed, pretty much. It wasn't the hard drive.

I think it's the motherboard at this point. I wonder if a 7200 G3 card will work in a 7500 Mac? I'm thinking of un-stripping the 7500. I originally stole the power supply out of the 7500 after the 7200's died and otherwise stripped the 7500, because I thought the 7200 was going to be a nice little workhorse machine with it's nice new G3 card where I could run old games like Duke Nukem 3D. Nobody ever did try the Crescendo/7200 in a 7500, so it's possible it might work. Otherwise I guess it just gets to sit in the box until it disintegrates.

I don't know how to go about converting the 7200 motherboard into a fine powder that I can snort. I need one of those really expensive blenders that they used to blend up an iPhone. I would have to cut the motherboard into strips or something to fit it into the blender but I could make it work.

At this point I'm going to try and get a few hours sleep and then tomorrow move everything over to the 7500 and try again. I don't know about 7200s in general but mine absolutely blows ass and it's a shame.

 
So much for sleep.

The Crescendo/7200 works in a 7500! It's like a really ghetto poor man's G3 upgrade for a 7500, but it works, DIMMs and all. It's all operative. Graphics appear to be accelerated too. Booted off a ZIP disk right now.

Wiping the hard drive now for a full OS 9 reinstall as the one on there was borked up.

 
The 7500 is so far flawless. OS 9 installed flawlessly. OS 9.1 upgrade flawless. G3 card is working beautifully. 256 MB RAM working great. CD is great. Now installing Duke Nukem 3D.

The 7200 motherboard will probably be turned into powder. let me know your suggestions on how to do that.

Must sleep, good nite.

 
Someone needs to start collecting 7200s very soon if any of this machine that is soon to be very rare are to be saved, because if the number that have been destroyed in recent weeks by this community of supposed rescuers of old Macs is anything to go by then they must be being trashed at a very high rate by people who aren't interested in old Macs!

 
The 7500 is so far flawless. OS 9 installed flawlessly. OS 9.1 upgrade flawless. G3 card is working beautifully. 256 MB RAM working great. CD is great. Now installing Duke Nukem 3D.
The 7200 motherboard will probably be turned into powder. let me know your suggestions on how to do that.

Must sleep, good nite.
Click to expand...
"Will it blend? That....is the question. I have with me today, an old, crappy, broken Power Macintosh 7200 motherboard..." :D

 
I wanted to save the 7200. I really did. I even cannibalized a good 7500 for parts. I was putting together an old games machine where I could run games like SimTower, SimCity 2000, Duke Nukem 3D, and some old programs like Graphing Calculator. I can run these on the G5 now in Classic mode but Leopard has no Classic mode. I picked the 7200 because the G3 cards were very cheap, and it also had a PC card where I could run some old PC games too, and because the 7200 was generally unloved/unappreciated. I wanted to show how for just a bit of cash the 7200 could be made into a great Classic OS machine.

Unfortunately, this particular 7200 failed me, and I won't have another one again until I come across one locally. My first 7200 I got from a garage sale and was sold off in a matter of days on LEMSwap to someone who needed to use an ImageWriter. This second one I got in a school auction with lots of other Macs.

It's crazy the 7500 can even use the 7200's special G3 upgrade. Sure it takes a PCI slot but for a Classic Games machine I don't really need lots of PCI slots. Onboard ethernet suffices, I don't need USB or FireWire (I use ZIP disks to move data between the old Macs and the G5), the onboard video is fine for old non 3D games.

The PCI PC Compatibility card does not seem to work on any other 7x00 Macs because it needs this proprietary little slot to plug a doohickey into in order to get video.

 
It doesn't surprise me that the 7200/G3 board works in a 7500, remember they are both based on a similar design.

 
I have a 6500 that I can try it in. Of course the 6500 is a significantly different motherboard design. If it works, it proves the versatility of the card.

 
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