It's Spring Break so I'm back in town at my parents' house. I got out the Power Mac 9500 to try putting a good PRAM battery in. The donor was the blue & white G3 (which is the main Mac at this house, nice!). I booted the G3 and then took the battery out, since I have the belief that if the machine is on, then the PRAM won't be lost as long as the battery is returned before the machine is powered down.

I took apart the 9500, put the battery in, pressed the red button, and *chime*!

Yes, the lack of a good PRAM battery was the problem.

However, we are still not good-to-go yet. The 9500 isn't attempting to boot the HD, floppy, or CD. Unfortunately, I don't have a Mac monitor here, so I can't get any video, but I'd imagine it's just a gray screen with cursor. It's likely back at the point I described in the very first post. I connected an ADB Mouse II and held down the button on startup to see if it would eject the floppy disk, and it did not.

Still more trouble-shooting to do, but I'll see if I can get it all fixed up. |)

Rodus

When you install a CPU upgrade you have to pull the old card, press the reset button, THEN install the new CPU. I had that problem with my G4 1000 upgrade. My 7500 wouldn't boot until I had removed the upgrade, pressed the reset button, and then reinstalled it.

Dog Cow,

Find the reset button on the motherboard and try pressing it with the CPU out and then reinstall it and try starting up again.

Success!

It turns out that the problem was two-fold: first was the PRAM battery, second was a SCSI conflict. Both are two really newbie mistakes which shouldn't have taken 5 months to diagnose, but oh well...

Anyway, the SCSI conflict was between the internal CD-ROM drive and the HD. I've disconnected the CD for the time being, and the 9500 boots up just OK. I backed up the hard drive (which had System 7.6 and from the looks of the Sharing Setup control panel appeared to have come from an LC III belonging to one 'wthww') to a Zip disk, wiped it (the HD) and installed System 7.5.3 from the 9500 Series Apple Macintosh CD. Total RAM is 112 MB.

This thing is a beast. I wasted about 3 hours playing Sim City 2000 on it yesterday.

"Software for processor cards in PCI power macs is not *required* since it replaces the original processor. It will run just fine, except Apple System Profiler may not display the correct speed or processor type."

Why does my 7500 boot up with a Sonnet banner under the Mac OS 9 logo and then load an extension if it's not needed?

Because the extension improves performance greatly, enabling all the optimizations available. When I boot with my Sonnet G3 400 MHz in an 8500 without any extensions, everything runs really slowly. I imagine it powers up with speculative execution off, the 2MB cache off, etc., for maximum compatibility, since it clearly has to run Apple's boot ROM before the extension loads.

Glad to hear you finally got the beast up and running.

The last time Rufus the cat caught an early morning mouse, he left the severed head on the floor in my room for my evening arrival. Lovely.

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It's a good thing he doesn't hunt horses

Glad to hear you finally got the beast up and running.

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Well, I didn't get to enjoy it for long. I packed it all up and got it shipped off to the "storage facility" the next day. I'm putting away all of my Macs so I can focus on Apple II. I want to master the Apple, and then I'll slowly ease into Mac programming later on. Otherwise, if I have both Apples and Macs at my disposal, I'll get bored after a month and start switching between the two and get nothing done. I don't even know how many Macs I have. It's that bad.

It's a good thing he doesn't hunt horses

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He knocked one over this morning.