Also consider testing a new PRAM battery. 6100s do the exact same thing that your machine is doing when the PRAM batts are dead.
Usually machines make some type of pre-arranged peeping noise if a RAM DIMM is bad. Not sure about cache memory...
PCI based are almost all capable of booting with a dead PRAM battery. In fact, even the NuBus based Power Macs can be made to boot with a dead PRAM battery if you cycle the power rapidly enough. I haven't seen a Mac that can't be booted with a dead PRAM battery since the 68k days...
My PTP died of a bad cache DIMM a few years ago. Because the cache is so closely tied to the CPU, when you cache goes south, there's no warning (as in no fun troubleshooting sounds or other built-in clues). Pretty much the only indication is a Mac that won't boot. Michael Macdonald (where is he lately, anyway?) claims that the cache in Power Computing clones is particularly susceptible to ESD from things as quotidian as dust bunnies, and that once your cache dies, your Mac is unbootable displaying exactly the symptoms described. It's easily fixable by removing the cache (something you should probably do anyway, if you ever upgrade to a G3 or G4). (Replacement sticks are ridiculously expensive, especially given the vintage of the hardware.)
My suggestion is to pull the cache DIMM before trying anything else. Depending on how much RAM you have, checking each stick may take a while.
The cache DIMM (I'm not sure where it is on a PowerBase) should look a lot like a ROM SIMM or RAM DIMM, but it will be in a socket without releases like the RAM... The socket will look very similar to the CPU daughter card socket.
Peace, Drew
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