Before I fire up any machine that has sat unused for a period of time I do the following:
1. Open Case

2. Clean interior with spray air.

3. Remove and blow out the PSU.

4. Reseat all cards and cables.

5. Reinstall PSU.

6. Close Case.

7. Offer sacrifice to God's of Tech

8. Power the sucker up.

Over time, buildup in toe form of dust, lack of use and storage do weird things to machines. I know that if it is just sitting there, unused and it was known to work before it was stored; then it should work fine. However this is not always the case. I have learned the hard way by spending countless hours troubleshooting a machine, when a simple system cleaning and card / cable reseat usually do the trick.

Give it a shot and report back.

Click to expand...

I cracked open the 9600 .... The inside was already very clean!! I reseated the RAM, took the PRAM battery from my dead 7300 and replaced the dead PRAM battery in the 9600. Installed two HDs from my dead 7300, and added the USB card from the 7300. Also, took the RAM from the 7300 and added to the 9600, so now there should be 584MB of RAM on the 9600.

Put everything together .... Now the 9600 does boot .... One of the previous problems seems to be the CD-ROM ... Not sure, but maybe it is not connected internally correctly? That probably explains why I couldn't boot from any of the CDs!!! I will need to open up the 9600 and change the plug for the CD-ROM to see if that works.

I'm running Disk Warrior from another internal HD (from my original G3 Blue & White, which is dead). Seems to be working ok. I need to figure out how to get the CD-ROM working, so I can try booting up from DiskWarrior, Norton, or TechTool Pro, and run the disk utilities and repairs.

I'd like to get a new, small HD (40-60GB, IDE?) for this 9600, maybe even a new SCSI HD (6-9GB?). Any suggestions??

-- vjmacaddict

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