It’s alive… IT’S ALIVE!!!

Some serious geeking-out in this entry. You have been warned.

My folks were in town over the weekend, and my dad brought down his old dual-processor PowerMac 9600 for a bit of troubleshooting. It’s a seven year old computer, and it’s having an interesting assortment of afflictions. The main symptom is a reluctance to start up. When you hit the power key, the front light comes on, the fan starts, and nothing else happens…

The first hurdle I had to overcome was that the old video card needed a 15-pin wide cable to connect to a monitor. Somewhere I have (or had) an adapter cable which would let me use a standard VGA monitor, but I haven’t needed it since before I moved into my house… After an hour or so of searching for it upstairs and downstairs, I realized that I had an alternative: a couple years ago, I’d bought an old Motorola Starmax mac clone on eBay. The power supply is dead and it’s not worth looking for a replacement any more, but still the box had been cluttering up a corner of the upstairs. It had a slightly newer ATI TwinTurbo 128 card, with both Mac and VGA connectors. Finally, a positive aspect of my packrat lifestyle!

With the new card in and the side panel off, I could hear that the hard drive was spinning up, but there was no other sign of activity. The startup chime wasn’t sounding, but that could have been a result of the volume having been turned all the way down. The Cmt-Option-P-R key combination to zap the parameter RAM didn’t seem to do anything either, so it was time to pull out the heavy guns. On the 9600 motherboard, just near the CPU daughtercard, there’s a small red button on a tiny silver square of metal. It’s called the CUDA reset button, and it clears everything out of the pRAM. After hitting that button, the machine started to behave a bit better. The hard drive spun up and made seeking sounds, and after about fifteen seconds the monitor blinked to life with the grey screen and ‘happy mac’ icon.

A few seconds later the “Welcome to OS 9.1” splash screen came on, and then the machine sat there. And sat there. And continued to sit there with no sign of progress. Rebooting with Control-Command-Power got back to the ‘happy mac’, and hodling down the Shift key brought things up with extensions disabled. And there was the desktop! And all the icons for the programs and the files that Dad needed… And with extensions off, there was no way to set up a network connection to get them off.

Rebooting brought up the ‘happy mac’ and then nothing. No splash screen, no welcome… My amazing Packrat Powers came in handy again though, on a shelf I found a bootable CD with MacOS 8 and the 8.1 update on it. Sadly the computer was unimpressed by the CD. Every time I booted it, it went to the internal HD. But little did it know I had a secret weapon! In a gingerbread cookie tin, I found a whole slew of floppy discs from when I was using a then state-of-the-art PowerBook 180. One of the discs claimed to be a bootable Norton Utilities emergency disk!

Ok. At this point I’ve only got the die-hard geeks left, so right now you’re quite correctly pointing out that a floppy disk designed to boot a pre-PowerPC powerbook hasn’t got a prayer of starting up a PowerMac 9600. And you’re right. It didn’t. I was just using it to buy the CD some time to spin up and be recognized. But after spewing out the offending floppy, it started up happily from the internal HD.

Long story short (too late, I know…) once the machine was up, I turned file sharing on and copied the entire hard drive on to a disk image on my OS X powerbook. I don’t know if the 9600 can be rescued at this point, so I’m just happy I was able to get everything off of it…