replying to W Arnold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> your post said "My 8600/350, mach 5, OS 8.6, which has given no trouble for over a year, has been booting with a bomb and saying illegal instruction, on an intermittent basis. ... The problem occures very early in the boot, the OS logo appears with gray screen and before... extensions load, the bomb appears. After this failure,I am able to get a boot if I shut down, ( ctl/command/pwr and hit " power" on box.,then reset pram and allow to boot. ... ext's are not at fault. Could I have a flakey Pram? If so, can it be replaced ? Wm."
Well, you certianly could replace the PRAM battery but that doesnt sound like an issue here. I am by no means some old seasoned expert in this, but let's try to reason this out with what facts you have and what we know about how a mac boots. think about the order in which the machine does its 'pre-flight check'--where it goes and senses, where it goes to see what its got on hand to start up with, where it 'looks', what state did you leave it in the last time you shut down?. the fact that the bomb appears even before the extensions load should tell you a lot. the fact that you have to reset the PRAM should tell you a lot. i am surprised that you haven't tried booting with extensions off, or at least you give no such mention in your post. since you are having the problem at startup, wouldn't it make sense to think about your startup folder? if the bomb dialog says illegal instruction, before the extension parade loads,wouldnt it be logical to think that something in the loading of the extensions is misconfigured? maybe the order in which they are loading, so that you're not suposed to load one thing unless something else is present first? [a murphy's law, making itself known during loading?] and the PRAM reset is another clue. I don't think its 'flakey', so much as you may have two different conditions requested in different places in your PRAM settings that technically cannot both be true at the same time. between the bomb apearing BEFORE the extensions parade, and resetting the PRAM getting you past the checkpoint, I think you must have a conflict somewhere in things you are trying to ask it to do that it can't have happening at the same time. so consider the order in which you are having the extensions come on, and consider what demands you are making on it with what you like to set in your PRAM, and consider what changes or simplifications you could afford to make to your startup sequence to remove that internal 'opposition'. you can alter the order in which things load by changing the titles with the keyboard, adding a space at the front of the name to put it at the top of the list, and other punctuation marks, to rejuggle the order, in spite of alphabetization. you probably knew that already. the other guys here are sure to know the heirarchy of that list of typing tricks. I dont have it memorized yet. do you change your startup folder, depending on what you intend to be using the machine for at a given session? you know--prep it beforehand, or make alternate startup folders standing by in your arsenal, one , say, with all your tools for a word processing session, another you turn to whan you want to do, say, a spreadsheet session, another when you want to do some photo or graphic work...and so on? 'cause if you have different startup folders for different sessions types, maybe it's just one of your startup folders that has the conflict like this. you say its intermittent. I don't think this is a hardware problem at all. you seem to have eliminated most of the possible hardware questions with your engineering knowledge. My guess is, this sounds much more like programming, a software command, where you have at least two different sets of code and the machine can't make both true at the same time--and if it did, it would be disastrous, hence the bomb warning. so you have to find a way to back off one or the other of the commands at that moment in time. maybe reorder them so that they're okay if one gets sets up before going to get the other one. does it matter to YOU, what order your extensions load, in? because clearly, it matters a lot to the machine, here. it sounds like something in your PRAM settings is in conflict with the extensions loading--or maybe the order in which the extensions are set to load in is untenable, and you could afford to shuffle them around some. and maybe the problem is in one startup folder only. all this is arrived at by sheer theory and thinking. not by what you would call lots of experience. I'm just reasoning it out by logic. janet http://community.webtv.net/mensabrains/BADCODE -- PCI-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PCI-PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/pci-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/pci-powermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
