My PowerBook 165c...Please help me fi problem Before School Starts. Read

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Level 1

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My PowerBook 165c...Please help me fi problem Before School Starts. Read

Hi!
Its almost time for the 7th Grade school year to begin and i just got home from Ohio with a Powerbook 165c! Boy did I think great thoughts about this antique and how it would help me throughout junior high, until this morning, when four the umpteenth time i booted the machine expecting it to start just as normal as it had the two weeks before. Nope! It gave me the Apple sound which we all love then, nothing came on the screen...no "Welcome to Macintosh"... Not even the little picture of the mac. then came the sound which i dread...DoDoDo(High tone)...DumDumDum(low tone) I called the guy up asking him whet was up and he said this has only happened once before on the same machine and he said, the next time i boot it it should be fine. HA! Nope! Please help me and please note i have no boot disks and the hard drive still whirs just fine. Please send results!

Powerbook 165c, Mac OS 8.6 or Earlier

Posted on Aug 17, 2008 6:51 AM

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Answer 1

Jan Hedlund

Level 7

24,337 points

Aug 17, 2008 9:03 AM in response to rynodino

Hi,

Could possibly be a problem with the internal SCSI drive or with a memory card. No sign of a Sad Mac on the screen? It may become necessary to open the PowerBook.

It is not a bad idea to have a bootable floppy. If you had access to another semi-old Macintosh computer with a built-in floppy drive, you could easily create one from the Network Access Disk 7.5 download here.

One thing to try is to make an attempt to start from a floppy while holding down the four keys Command(Apple) + Option(Alt) + Shift + Delete(Backspace). If that works, the problem could be related to the SCSI hard disk drive driver software.

Although it should not make a difference here, it never hurts to reset the Power Manager.

Jan

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Answer 2

Aug 17, 2008 7:09 PM in response to rynodino

Ahhh the 'chime's of doom'. I haven't heard them in a while but these were used to help trouble shoot problems with Macs. Clever...

Ram failure = eight-tone error chord sequence which sounds after startup chord
-if it's this one you might just have to unscrew the bottom case and very carefully pull apart the PowerBook. The two parts are connected together by a ribbon cable. Sorry i don't remember all the details as it's been quite a few years since I've pulled one apart.

*be careful* when you reassemble the PowerBook as this plastic gets brittle over time and you could snap the screw mounting holes, gentle is good!

hardware failure = four-tone error chord which sounds after startup chord
-could be a bad hard drive, to test this you have to disconnect the ribbon cable going into the hard drive and try a restart.
-could do the resets that Jan recommended as well, won't hurt to try them first.

I think those are the only two. Sounds like it's the memory problem, I've had memory cards go 'bad' on some old PowerBooks so could be that although I would try unplugging and plugging back in the memory board.

Wish I could remember where the full list of chimes of doom was listed...

Kevin

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