This involves a friends' Power Center Pro 180 machine. She let me have the
thing for two weeks to have a last shot at fixing it before he husband gets
his way and they buy a Dell PC. I am stymied.
For many months, it was running fine under OS 9.04, till start up crashing
problem began - on start up, before extensions load, it bombs with an error
7 message. Does same thing starting up w/o extensions. Also bombs while
starting off any CD that has an OS newer than 8.1 - HOWEVER, if you start up
with an 8.1 CD, it starts up fine.
I put OS 8.1 on the hard drive, but curiously, it will not start off the
hard drive if OS 8.1 is on the hard drive, only if it is on a start up CD. I
took the hard drive out and put it in my Apple 8500/180 and it starts that
machine (with OS 9.04) just fine, so whatever's on the drive probably isnt
the problem.
Tech Tool Pro 2 (which is the only version I can use on it, since it uses
8.1 to start the machine) showed a bad RAM chip; I replaced the one 64mb
chip with two 32mb new ones - same error. I tried the two chips in different
RAM slots (A1, A2, then A3, A4) ; same crashing.
PRAM battery is fine, zapping PRAM has no effect, replacing system, no
effect, reformat/reinitialize/new system etc -- no effect. No viruses ever
found. Removed and reseated all the cards - video, processor, RAM, whatever
the other two are - no effect. Only way this machine starts up without
crashing is on an OS 8.1 CD, or any CD with that system (like Tech Tools 2
or Norton 3.5).
My surmise is that something on the board or another chip somewhere in it
got zapped, perhaps due to a power surge (she lives in the country where the
power is unreliable and there's a lot of lightning, and she was using no
power protection or surge arrestor)
ANY ideas would be greatly appreciated, including what color to paint it if
we turn it into a parking bumper.
Thank you in advance-
Michael Russo
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