[Hidden-tech] Perplexing Beige Mac G3 problem

[Will Loving]

I'm wondering if any Hidden-Tech members have had experience with a specific
Beige G3 Mac problem that I've encountered. Up until now, I¹ve never found a
Mac problem I couldn¹t solve or at least find an explanation for, but this
one has really got me. I have a set of three identical Beige 233Mhz G3
machines that came to my son's school as a donation from Smith College. All
are stock and exhibit the exact same symptom when running under OS X, 10.2.x
as well as under Panther (10.3) using XPostFacto.

I wipe the HD and do a clean install of 10.2 followed by updates to 10.2.8,
OS install and apps. At some point, the machine appears to go to sleep. Once
asleep, it cannot be awakened. The only option is a hardware restart. It
will usually startup, though usually it will boot into OS 9 instead of X.
After resetting the startup disk, it will boot into X.

Occasionally, however, it will not boot at all and sit with the flashing
icon. Booting off the install CD and running Disk Utility fails to find any
problem except that you can¹t select the HD as a startup disk. This last I¹m
not positive I¹ve experience with all the machines, it may relate to having
a Sonnet ATA card installed. However, the sleep symptoms are consistent
across all three machines even with no other cards installed.

I¹ve tried everything I can think of including PRAM, open firmware NVRAM
reset and reset All, swapping in different hard drives, etc. I've spent a
lot of hours trying to track this down including Apple's discussion boards
and other places and have gotten nowhere. Any ideas? Thanks!

Will Loving

Will Loving
Dedication Technologies, Inc.
(formerly Human Data Design)

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