Hi,
Did you ever find a solution for the 8600/monitor/restart
thing?
My 8600 does the same thing, have to restart after every cold
boot to get the monitors to work.
It's been like that ever since I bought it, earlier this year.
I don't have the monitor powered from the Mac, though.
I've tried different monitors, 2 monitors, only 1 monitor;
multiscan, non-multi-scan; different configurations as far as
who gets startupscreen/menubar; ......
(and a bunch of other important diagnostic stuff which I had
to delete because the List bounced my first email telling me
that the message was 10K which is too long so I snipped out a
couple of paragraphs, possibly important details I dunno).
With no PCI cards installed and only one monitor hooked up,
cold-starts seem to hang - even when shift-starting with
extensions off - and you just get a black screen - have to
restart, then it works ok. Same with totally reinstalled
System software.
However, with a PCI graphics cards installed and two monitors
hooked up to the Mac, then whichever screen is hooked up to
the PCI card comes up black (and unavailable - can't even move
the cursor to it, like you normally would) at cold start,
while the other monitor shows up normally - but again, after
restart, everything works fine. This happens regardless of
monitor software configurations (startup screen, etc), or
which monitor is hooked to what.
I wanted to see what the differences were between cold start
and restart, with the *two* monitors (which even on cold
starts allow me one functioning screen so I can run some
diagnostics). I ran an older app called Tattletech, and one of
the most noticeable differences, and I don't have any idea
what this means or how to interpret it, is that at cold-start
it says, for the one monitor that it sees on built-in video:
- Sync = Horizontal Disabled, Vertical Disabled,
Red, TriState
Whereas a minute later at re-start it says, this time for
*both* monitors - one from PCI card, one on built-in video:
- Sync = Horizontal Disabled, Composite Disabled,
Blue, Green, Red, TriState
Further, even though all monitors and OS's that I've tried
with this Mac will still quite happily show a normal-looking
picture on the PCI-card monitor regardless of whether the PCI
card software is installed or not - it would seem that the
only thing the software does is give you acceleration and 3D
stuff and all that - nevertheless, even *with* the correct
software properly installed, another TattleTech item correctly
identifies the ATI card in the PCI slot as far as Name, Model,
Revision, Device ID, etc., for both coldstarts and re-starts,
but then it diverges:
At cold-start At re-start
Driver#=[Unknown] Driver#=-52
I don't see how that could be a software problem, since
ordinarily (as mentioned above) any monitor hooked to it will
ordinarily work even without any ATI stuff in the System
folder or anywhere else. That PCI card worked fine on a
different Mac, either with software or without, and of
course even with *no* PCI cards at all installed, this Mac
still messes up the monitor at cold-start.
** However, I don't necessarily believe everything that
TattleTech says - I've noticed, with other stuff, that it gets
things wrong sometimes, so its reports may not be entirely
reliable.
Why does this Mac have trouble accessing the above PCI info at
cold-starts and what controls the exchange of PCI data -
motherboard/ROM/OS/what? Did some previous owner static-zap
it or something? (not me, I'm careful about that)
Another bizarre clue:
My 8600's behavior is dependent on the ambient temperature
or how long it's been since the Mac was last run. If the Mac
is still warm (having been run within the last hour or 2),
then everything works fine at cold-start, but after it's
cooled off for more than a few hours or overnight, then it
acts up on cold-boot, and requires the start/restart
sequence. Also, during some of the rare warm days (70-
degrees plus) here last summer, it would sometimes
(but not always) start up ok even it had been shut off for a
long period of time. For what it's worth, the Mac's power
strip is *always* on - I never shut that off. So it's always
got power to it, even when not running, as do the monitors.
** I'm quite certain that it's absolutely *not* faulty
monitors - I've heard about the solder-joints and stuff in
certain monitors, but I've tried three different monitors with
this 8600 (2 multiscans and 1 antique non-multiscan), and
hooking them up in different configurations shows that the
monitors are in good working order. Also, none of them require
adapters or anything.
I'm beginning to suspect some sort of electrical-component
deterioration or something else wrong in there. I keep
thinking, oddly, of those little dealies - I forget what
they're called (wild unsubstantiated guessing follows) - maybe
capacitors? those things that are supposed to hold a charge
for a while? if one of those was in early stages of failure,
would it take it longer to get "charged up" to where it would
work right? maybe just the brief time that it takes to first
do a cold-start and then hit Restart might be enough time for
it to get warmed up or charged up or whatever, and function
correctly? Also, and this is just more total guessing, but
maybe it's like they hold a charge longer at warmer temps
(like with batteries) which would explain how come my Mac had
slightly less cold-start/monitor problems during those few
warm days last summer. I don't know. That could be all wrong.
My 8600 seems to not be getting any worse (yet) and my
workaround is just to leave it run all the time and only
restart when I need to switch startup drives. Less
annoying than playing the start/restart game.
Haven't replaced the VRAM or L2 cache, yet. Maybe that would
help. Might do that (as finances allow). Right now, I've
pretty much gotten used to the damn thing - at least it
was cheap, and it's still a better machine than my old
Mac was.
- Jamie Marie with the mysterious 8600 (200 MHz 604e)
---------- Original message ----------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 16:24:52 EST
Subject: Monitor and 8600, PLUS Sonnet Tempo Trio, and Video
<snip>
> the 8600 would boot, but the monitor would never come up.
> I had to do a quick power off, then on. When I switched
> everything, now the 7600 powers up the 14" like it used
> to do the 20"er and I have to do the On/Off/On thing with
> the 8600 and the 20"er. Do 8600 models somehow get too far
> into the boot process before the monitor has time to get
> up and running?
<snip>
> Curiously though, I see that the Video part of the report
> shows TWO Built-in display cards
<snip>
.
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