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Re: IIgs repair help
In article <1993Nov12.143419.10176@alw.nih.gov>, Jim Owens <jow@helix.nih.gov> writes:
|> My suggestion, inspired by a teacher in Stafford County, VA, (Bill
|> Warrick) was to see if any of the kids (7th graders only until Mrs.
|> Corrado gets a feel for how the club will work) would be interested in
|> trying to repair some computers to be turned over to the school. It's a
Neat idea. So, let's see what we have here.
|> Right now there is a IIgs with a problem. It is due to go into a
|> Kindergarten classroom in January. This poor machine will not recognize
|> any floppy drive. Instead, when it is turned on it immediately clicks
|> while the light on the box flashes on and off rapidly and the light on
|> the floppy drive flashes at maybe half the rate of that on the cpu box.
Hmm. 'The light on the box' is the green power LED I gather? If that flashes,
you have a problem with the power supply. Either get schematics (don't
ask me from where) and repair it, or buy a new one.
Now, _before_ you start working your butt off on the PWRSUP, try this: Take
another GS. Open both machines. Locate the power supply to the left, pull off
the connector to the motherboard, and simply 'unsnap' the power supply. Put
the supply from the machine that is working into the machine that is not
working. That _should_ cure your problem if I interpreted your description
correctly.
If it _does_ cure your problem, buy a GS power supply from say Alltech and
replace the defect one with it. Voila'!, repair finished.
You might, as you are already asking on the net about help, give the children
some knowledge on how to generally solve computer problems ... or rather,
show them ways to quickly get at information, one way being picking a
suitable newsgroup and asking, reading the FAQ for that group, etc.
I find this "skill" to be very useful, yet it takes so little to use it.
|> Mrs. Corrado has used the drives (3&1/2" and 5&1/4" daisy chained)
|> successfully with other IIgs, and drives that work on other IIgs do not
Good, so at least the drive seems to have survived this.
|> A coworker's nephew had a similar thing happen to him and he claims to
|> have fixed it by accessing using the Control Panel to reset something in
|> the PRAM. I was instructed to start the IIgs with the Option key down to
It's BRAM (Battery RAM). Highly unlikely. If the machine won't boot from
the floppy, that can be "cured" in the CP, but when the machine is obviously
suffering from a hardware failure, the CP won't do you much good.
|> get the Control Panel. It didn't work, so now I am taking the manuals
|> home to see if I can decipher what the nephew meant. It occurred to me
Well, as the GS has only spurious power (assuming you meant the power LED
up above when you talked about the blinkenlights :), you cannot get to
the CP, of course. If you hold down the option key, you get a dialog asking
you if you'd like to write factory default values to the battery RAM. To access
the CP anytime and alter parameters there, press Command-Control-Escape (all
at the same time, command is the "Open Apple" or "Clover" key).
|> that if it is a parameter RAM problem, perhaps the battery is dead, but I
|> don't know what happens if that is the case. Any suggestions will be
If the battery of a machine "dies", all settings in the BRAM such as screen
type and color, keyboard type, use of slots, startup slot, time and date
etc. etc. will be at default values when you power up. To remedy that problem,
buy a Slide-On battery replacement from Nite Owl. Lift off the power supply,
cut the lithium battery off very near to its casing and slide the new battery
on the wires that are left standing up. Snap the power supply into place again,
close the GS, power it up and set all BRAM paramters as you want them. That's
it. Just in case your battery _does_ give out in the near future :)
Regards
Soenke
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(RACTER) ! FIDO: 2:246/13 Soenke Behrens