First apologies for not being able to respond more quickly to the helpful posts (and I agree this is a 5-star group - just waiting till I can be of some help myself!) This is because I live in Oxford, England and I have my Mac at home so I have a very limited window to communicate...
This is the story so far as briefly as I can... I had been using the Ati video card (marked mach64-VR) which came with the S900 (Pulsar in UK) for video capture ever since I got my S900 in '98. I bought a new gold-plated scart cable for my VCR because someone said it would improve quality. I tried using the s-video connector and the capture picture disappeared completely and would not come back. At this stage the ordinary display was fine. I tried moving the Ati card to slot 3 (I later read on Umax site it only works in 1 or 2) but after this the machine would not display anything on the VGA monitor I had been using for years. This problem persisted even when I moved the card back to slot 2. In growing desperation I tried an old 14" Apple monitor from my dusty old LC475 - on this I got two tiny desktops displayed side by side! Then the machine stopped booting altogether. I decided to take it to the menders and he managed to get it to boot and he changed the battery and replaced the video card with a second hand FormacGA6. He is a Mac veteran and tried for two weeks but finally admitted defeat (and only charged me for two hours!) The machine worked fine when I booted up from the disk volume with OS8.1 However, if I tried to boot from OS9.1 the Welcome to MacOS "splash" screen appeared and then started to load extensions icons appearing then the screen went dark and started to flash grey-dark-grey-dark... To get out of this mode I have to do the three-finger reboot and immediately press the option-command-P-R to zap PRAM three times and then hold down the shift key to reboot with extensions off when it completes its boot up fine. So I thought I'd turn off all the extensions and add them back in gradually. Turning off all extensions via Extensions manager didn't work - same flashing grey result. So I took the drastic measure of moving all the extensions out of the Extensions folder manually (although the folder I moved them to is in the System Folder could this be a mistake?) In this state the splash screen appears for a while no icons appear, the splash screen disappears the desktop colour is there and the top menu bar appears (no time for words to show) and then... the flashing grey. I erased the OS9 volume and did a clean install of OS9 and upgraded to OS9.1 same symptoms... It's very frustrating because I know the machine worked fine on OS9.1 before indeed one program only seemed to work on this version. Jeff asked what is the PCI card arrangement, so from the top (as they say): Slot1 empty Slot2 Formac GA6 video card Slot3 empty Slot4 Formac Fast SCSI PowerRaid Slot5 Empty Slot6 FireWire make unknown I did try putting the Ati card back in slot 1 to see if I could use it at the same time as the Formac and just for Video Capture under OS8.1 but XClaimVR Video Recorder gave error "not enough off-screen memory" or some such. Just for the record I have the original 2Gb drive and two fast SCSI drives each with two partitions. OS8.1 and OS9.1 are in different partitions on different drives. I have a Formac G3/400 upgrade card which has worked perfectly and comes up as 445Mhz in System Profiler. I don't think I can add any more and I'm sure many list members wish I hadn't been this detailed! As you can tell I have upgraded carefully and ironically I was looking to go to OSX but at the moment I'd happily never complain for what I had before... ;( I'm in your hands! >At 16:45 -0700 07/17/2002, Howie S wrote: > >>I'm hoping we can get Jeff W. to review this thread. Other than suspecting 2 >>bad video cards, I'm missing something that I fear might be obvious. > >I've been skimming but not really paying close attention. Nothing >leapt to mind in the earlier postings, but having a child seems to >decrease attention span for non-child things by a factor of two or >three, so I could easily have missed something. > >What I most clearly remember is wondering what his arrangement of PCI >cards is. > >Tim could you post your PCI card configuration, and a quick rehash of >the symptoms you're experiencing. It sounds like you're getting a >freeze after the OS starts to load in OS 9.1? Or the OS is loading >okay, but your video is going blank and doesn't come back? > >Jeff Walther > >-- >SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... > > Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | > Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | > > Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> > >SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.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/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> > >Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com -- -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.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/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
