Please Please help. Ti 550MHz Won't Boot... Why? Full story inside.

[Luke Mazzeri]

My TiBook 550 stopped booting.

the last unusual thing that happened was that i was copying some of my 
friend's audio cd's for him (he's going back home to africa to visit 
and doesn't want to chance loosing his originals) - i was also at the 
tail end of a 26hour-straight 3D rendering stint - and i was also 
running a demo version of ZBrush (very very cool 3D sculpting/painting 
software) - ZBrush runs under os 9 (i had it running in classic) - the 
unusual thing that happened was that (and this has *never* happened to 
me before) the first 3 cd's i tried to burn would burn all the way to 
the point where it said 00:00 sec remaining (Toast running under os 
x.2.2) and then toast would just sit there indefinitely, never 
finishing - so i force-quit toast 3 different times for the same reason 
- i *suspect* that all this might have been due to classic trying to 
grab control of the cd's (toast mounts and unmounts the cd's when it 
it's burning) or the fact that iTunes tried to launch on the first cd 
burning attempt (which i quit iTunes normally)

my 3D rendering job finished (jeez! 26 hours for 8 seconds of video) 
and i quit the 3D app.  the movie file was unplayable (a first for me 
for this 3D app) - 26 hours down the drain...

anyway - i rebooted the machine - or i should say *tried* to reboot...

this is what i get:  the machine (550MHz TiBook w/ 512MB ram running os 
10.2.2 and classis 9.2.2 - classic is not set to auto launch - launched 
it manually as i always do with extensions off) powers on - after a few 
seconds the grey screen w/ the apple logo appears and in less that 1/2 
a second the apple 'drops' down about 20 pixels on the screen (it just 
jumps down about a 1/4 inch immediately after it appears) - then it 
never proceeds any farther - no spinney circle lines -

some of the things i have tried are:
* pressing the reset button then waiting 5 or more seconds and 
reattempting power-on
* zapping the PRAM (4 or 5 times)
* pulling the battery and ac adapter and letting it sit overnight
* pressing and holding the reset button while there was no battery or 
ac adapter and simultaneously pressing the power button (?)
* tried booting while holding down the C key w/ my Jag install cd in 
the drive
* tried booting whilst holding down the C key w/ my os 9.2.? cd in the 
drive
* tried booting whilst holding command s
*... command v
*... command x
*... shift
*... and various other combinations
* tried booting with only the one 256MB apple (samsung) ram module
* tried booting with the other (club mac supplied Viking) 256MB module
* tried booting w/ NO ram (got a 'bong' sound w/ the sleep LED flashing 
what looks like a 'POST' error message number - i assume to mean "hey 
where's the ram, dingus?")

what the machine WILL do:
* i CAN boot into Firewire Target Disk Mode (and access the drive very 
normally from my b&w G3 'server'...
* i can run fsck on my Ti's hard drive from the G3 over firewire - says 
drive's ok.
* i can run Disk Utility to check the drive - it reports drive as ok.
* i can access the Ti's drive completely normally in FWTDM 
(Firewire....)
* i can boot into Open Firmware
* i can leave the machine sitting in FTDM 'till the battery dies
* after about 5 minutes of FTDM the fan kicks on into leaf-blower mode 
and over the course  of the next 15 to 20 minutes the whole aft end of 
the machine just progresses towards getting insanely hot.

please don't ask me to check the apple website - been there - done that 
- the only help i got from that was 1.) press reset, wait 5sec, power 
on.  2.) send it to apple

Would someone please help me?  (and others who may someday experience 
this very problem) Please.

Here's hoping...


Luke Mazzeri


p.s. searching the apple website is horrid.  it seems you can search 
for the simplest terms and get either an astonishing *nothing* back for 
results or 500 documents w/ no semblance of relation to what you were 
searching for.





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http://www.mp3.com/lukeetyrnal   (music no one likes)
etyrnal at ameritech.net