Dead iBook... help?

[Anthony]

Some quick background info... I have a 2001 Dual USB iBook G3/500. I didn't have it much longer than a week or two before I cracked it open and performed the resistor mods to up the bus speed to 100MHz (thus making it a G3/600.) Its been fine for 2 years until recently. The machine always reported itself as being "400MHz" although it ran considerably faster than the original 500MHz. There is a firmware hack out on the web somewhere that corrects this and makes the OS report the correct CPU and bus speeds. It requires editing the NVRAM directly and again its been fine for pretty much 2 years. Recently my machine has been "losing" the NVRAM modifications and I've had to reprogram it several times... possibly the little battery on the motherboard that keeps that stuff alive is dead. Anyway, I was doing the NVRAM hack today and typed the final "reset-all" command in open firmware and the machine restarted... gave me the familiar start-up chimes but that was it. Nothing on the screen, the hard drive isn't doing anything so I'm sure it isn't booting. I've tried the PMU reset button on the side, tried the alt-command-p-r sequence, but nothing. It always gives me the chimes when I power up but no further. I tried an external keyboard, and an external monitor but neither make a difference. (Nothing displays on the external monitor at all.)

Anybody have any ideas I could try? Or know of somewhere that might service this despite the fact its been overclocked? From what I've read I don't think Apple will even look at it because of the modifications. Is there a way to reprogram the firmware given that the machine doesn't boot? Any advice would be really, really appreciated... I feel like I lost a family member today ::sleepy::

 

[Giaguara]

You could try with "I loaned it to a friend of mine who is a computer expert, for his desertation work at univ.. he's the computer expert. I don't know what he has done, I can't even send attachments in mail..." - I hope it's not anything fried.