//GS suddenly won't boot

["mehenn" <mehenn@worldnet.att.net>]

I gave an old //GS Woz LE to a friend of mine who's never owned a computer.
Heck, it was 11 years old but still worked fine and ran everything he
needed.  After he received it, he got it up and running and all systems were
go.

It has an Applied Ingenuity 40 Meg hard drive installed in slot 7.  Slot 1,
4, 5, and 6 are empty.  Slot 2 has an AE IBM card and slot 3 has an AE
accelerator.  The RAM slot has a full AE 1.5 Meg card, I think; it may be
bigger than that, nut it has lots of RAM.

He called me this afternoon in a panic because he can't get the machine to
boot.  I talked him through the control panel and we verified that slot 7
was set to Your Card.  We tried booting with Slots set to 7, 5 and Scan.  He
removed, cleaned and re-seated the RAM card and hard drive controller card
and we tried the whole thing all over again.  We put a Hyperstudio disk in
the 3.5" drive (because I though it might have an op system on it) during
the second series of boot attempts.

The only reactioin to all of this is the signature BONK and then an "Unable
to load PRODOS" screen.  He stated that the drive light on the 3.5"
flickered but didn't stay on for any appreciable time.

The last time this happened to me was in 1990 when the battery or VGC chip
was causing problems; I don't remember exactly.  I had to have the
motherboard replaced then and I think he's got a ROM 03, now.  It's at least
an 01.

Trouble is, he's in New Mexico and I'm stuck in Hawaii.  I have to do this
all over the phone and he is not very computer literate.  Any ideas?

mehenn@worldnet.att.net.