FW800 no longer boots

[Metrophage]

I am not expecting help, I am too angry to think about that right now, so I am mostly just complaining at this stage!

There is this running "joke" with me that I spend weeks setting up a Mac and getting it just perfectly how I like it. But then, once I come back to it later to do some actual work - it is completely borked. Well - it has happened to me yet again, for like the fourth time in a row. I have some seriously crap luck.

The MDD/FW800 was running great, my dream OS 9 machine, which I'd fire up every month or so over the past year, usually sorting through my mess of files looking for something. I had not been working on my music for a while.

So this weekend I found a stash of three ATA drives which I knew I used as backups on my Power Macs and decided to see what was on them. So I connected them each to the FW800 33MHz bus and booted, examining the contents of the drives, making a list and labeling each drive for future reference.

But I missed the box, and had been mulling over some music ideas, so tried starting it yesterday to do some work. And suddenly it doesn't boot. I get a few freezes during boot, and then the dreaded Open Firmware error "invalid memory access at %SRR0". I had two 512MB sticks of RAM which have worked for a while, and it won't boot with either of them anymore. How/why would swapping out some drives in the media bay wreck both sticks of RAM?

So far I have removed all other peripheral cards. And I will try to be methodical about analyzing this. But right now it is so stressful. I am completely broke now and am stuck with whatever solutions I can devise with what I have here, and I am not very hopeful. Last night I was completely flipping out because I could not get ANY of my OS 9 systems to boot. I have three PowerBooks and one PSU - guess what? Suddenly the power supply is toast, so I can't use any of those. My TiBook now boots with digital noise for a display, suggesting that a flex cable in the hinges is broken. And my 8600 boots, but without activating the ATI card output so that I can actually see anything. I have two 15-pin Apple monitor adaptors, but I haven't used them for yonks and can't find them. It was a lame night, indeed. Fortunately, my 8600 is now booting with the monitor, so at least I can use that.

AAAIIIIEEEE!!!!!!!

[GaryN]

Do you have a wife who feels neglected perhaps? A jealous, psychotic bandmate? Or, failing all else, perhaps an exorcism is in order…

[IIO]

i know this issue, too.

a system has been working for 10 years like a charm, then you dont do anything with it for 3 months-  and when you come back the PRAM settings are weird, two of your 15 volumes wont mount anymore and your favorite app claims it cant run because of some missing extension.

then, when you try to fix these things, you will find out that you dont have a backup copy of your favorite app, and scanning the disks with norton makes another 3 volumes unusable instead of fixing the first two.

lost internet settings or a computer which wont boot anymore for no reason usually make the weekend a perfect one.

[DieHard]

Just as a small word of advise, since I have seen this happen before...definitely avoid messing with a perfectly running system to view old hard drives;  the best method is to leave your G4 shut and buy a cheap Firewire ATA case that you can easily swap drives  to view their contents. For viewing many drives you can buy a more expensive OWC Cradle (if they are SATA) and even hop swap drives;  This method does not change your Mac's PRAM settings with the different Hard drive geometries, so it is the preferred method and leaves your perfectly working mac safe from being altered....

So, Step 1, reset PRAM (WAIT for 3 Chimes, not just 1)

If all else fails, Diehard Santa has plenty of G4 Towers for good boys and girls that save up the shipping money; Santa also has extra RAM and other parts.

[Metrophage]

Do you have a wife who feels neglected perhaps? A jealous, psychotic bandmate? Or, failing all else, perhaps an exorcism is in order…

Fortunately, I can rule out sabotage, and probably demonic possession. I explained to my kid - as IIO observed - that with electronics they more often break from disuse rather than overuse.

Just as a small word of advise, since I have seen this happen before...definitely avoid messing with a perfectly running system to view old hard drives;  the best method is to leave your G4 shut...

I know... I just didn't expect it to bork so badly. It was wishful thinking on my part. This was also the only box I have to view the drives with - all my other systems are either SCSI or SATA - or laptops.

buy a cheap Firewire ATA case that you can easily swap drives  to view their contents. For viewing many drives you can buy a more expensive OWC Cradle (if they are SATA) and even hop swap drives;  This method does not change your Mac's PRAM settings with the different Hard drive geometries, so it is the preferred method and leaves your perfectly working mac safe from being altered...

That's really good to know. I was speculating about whether or not external drives would simply cause the same problem.

So, Step 1, reset PRAM (WAIT for 3 Chimes, not just 1)

Unfortunately, that's not working. Neither command+option+p+r nor command+option+o+f are doing anything. It starts directly to errors tones (no valid RAM). I have tried removing the PRAM battery overnight as well. It seems improbable that every stick of 2700 DDR SDRAM has suddenly become useless. I worry that it might be a memory controller or other board problem. But I have no way to be certain. I think of swapping out drives in a tower as being usually fairly low-risk to the electronics. I didn't even touch the board or any other electronics, apart from plugging two cables into the drives, which were set in the optical bay.

But I am not going to give up on it just yet. It would not be the first time that I had a Mac which seems unsalvageable.

[nanopico]

One of my MDD does similar things.  Every time it does I just push the power button and hold it until it makes a long tone and keep holding it. When the tone is done it restarts and you can release the power button.  Most of the time this does it for that machine.

[Metrophage]

One of my MDD does similar things.  Every time it does I just push the power button and hold it until it makes a long tone and keep holding it. When the tone is done it restarts and you can release the power button.  Most of the time this does it for that machine.

I had forgotten about that trick, thanks for the reminder.

I have been able to to get the box to boot! But it is still not booting well, it has a few lingering problems as of yet.

What got it running was finessing it through a series of PMU resets, where after each reset it seemed to creep closer to booting. First I got it to chime, then I go to it activating the display, then spinning up the drives, selecting an OS, starting to boot. After about five iterations of PMU resets and trying to get it to boot a few times between each - about an hour's effort - I got it to successfully boot.

The problems I am still dealing with: It boots into my minimal 10.4.11 fallback system, and it has some directory problems, which I guess isn't surprising with all of the false starts it has put up with. There are some leaf discrepancies, and running fsck from single user just freezes. I think I have DW4 around here somewhere, but I've never used it, I might give it a try if I can find it.

As of yet, I cannot get it to boot OS 9, I can select it, but it only gets so far as the welcome screen and doesn't load any extensions. Running Disk Utility from 10.4.11 and having it check my OS 9 drive, it passes those tests fine, for whatever that's worth. I am wondering if my PMU resets might have erased some Open Firmware settings that I used to allow it to boot 9, but I don't remember. I hope I can find my notes from the time.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement!

[Metrophage]

Woohoo! Now it is booting OS 9 also! It was similar to getting it to boot. Each time it would hang further into the boot process, until it was finally running. I put all of my RAM back in and it seems fine. I will likely be handling this system with kid gloves for a while. Mac OS 9 Lives!

[DieHard]

Finally... Excellent work

[ovalking]

Glad you got there in the end.
I'm afraid most of us have probably run into this type of problem on occasion. Any time the troubleshooting process seems to defy logic, is a real test of character!

Reminds me of the 8100 that was dreadfully unstable whatever I tried, so I decided to break. Put the RAM in a 7100, but it wouldn't boot. Rebuilt the 8100 including said RAM and it's been fine ever since!

And it's not just computers. My car would not start recently - changed fuel pump relay and it starts. Put old one back... and it starts!

On a more helpful note, one of the best things I invested in was a Firewire cable. Starting up a Mac in target mode so you can easily access the drive from another has been real useful in the troubleshooting game.

[Metrophage]

Since I said that I fixed the problem, maybe I should start a new topic for it to be seen, but...

A further problem with this is that since I've gotten this system running again, I can no longer boot any OS 9 based bootable CDs. Between not being able to boot from firewire or CD, I am having a difficult time of running any diagnostic/repair programs on this volume. And if I need to reinstall, I will need to use these CDs anyway.

When the system was still acting flaky, I was able to option-boot from these same discs. The drive is verifiably good, it is a newly unboxed superdrive which can read and write these CDs, and mounts them fine. I am guessing that this is an Open Firmware problem.

EDIT: Can anybody tell me - does Disk Warrior 4.1 still fix or do anything useful for OS 9? I don't know if later versions are still OS-aware of earlier stuff, or if it was all dropped. I know that people still ran Classic environments in this era, or had shared X/9 partitions. So I am *guessing* that it might at least be safe, if not hopefully useful.

Running DW2.1 from MacTron's recovery CD on my TiBook, it tells me that my 9.2.2 system on there is irreparably damaged also. So now I need to figure out how to back up yet more files that I don't really have space for.

My New June's Resolution is to learn to take better care of my Mac file systems...