PowerMac 7600 not showing picture

M

macall

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Alright after 3 months I finally found the part I thought I need, but I was wrong. Okay, at first my new PowerMac 7600 which is old but it was new to me in august anyways, it was running fine beutiful I loved it, but then one day the grey screen with the little computer never showed up anymore. The computer it self still bootsup fine and the chime goes off as normal but I can see anything on the monitor, which is a working sony trinitron multiscan 100es, so i reset the vram, pram, and bought a new bios battery or whatever its called, and I even pushed the cuda switch, nothing fixed the problem, I was on another forum i think computing.net and they suggested it was my on board graphics card. So i went on ebay and found a nice ATI Radeon or something like that it was 8mb vram PCI i thought perfect i can get my baby back so i bought it got it in recently and went to turn it on nothing happend its the same problem. the computer starts up fine and chimes fine but i do not see the grey screen. What is wrong?

P.S. This PowerMac brought me into the macworld and it hasnt pulled me out since then I bought my G3 iBook and im hoping for the mac mini or a power book.
 
Exactly what do you get on your monitor?
Have you tried booting (starting up) with the OS CD or a third party utility CD like Norton for OS 9?
 
One other thing. That ATI card you bought, was it for a PC? If so, it's possible that the hardware isn't Mac compatible as it doesn't have compatibility for the Mac hardcoded into the firmware. Sure, you can "flash" it, but that's always dodgy. There was an old thread here about how some PCI video cards normally made for the PC will not work on a Mac even though both computers have PCI slots. Do a search for it on the board and you'll see what I mean.

Also, be sure to fallback to your original video connection and do what Cheryl suggests. It's possible that maybe your system folder got corrupted.

Have you tested that monitor on another computer?? It could be that your monitor has gone bad.

The other thing you might want to do is replace the accelerator card with the original CPU daughtercard. See if this does anything for you....it could be that the extension / control panel for that accelerator card might not be loading (this is an assumption as I have never owned an accelerator card). Sometimes putting everything back to the way it was from the factory might rule out that issue.
 
Alright, I have tried booting from CD and that doesnt work, For the graphics card well I know for sure its for a Mac as its the long 12 inch kind that is made for the powermacs but yes i will try returning the processor card to its original state. Thanks for all the help
 
Just because it fits into the PCI slot doesn't mean it's Macintosh-compatible, as both PCs and Macintosh computers use the same PCI slots (the difference is the firmware [or built-in software] on the card -- it has to be specifically programmed for Macintosh or PC). As far as I know, no ATi Radeon card specifically made for Macintosh computers had 8MB of RAM -- I believe the minimum amount of VRAM on an ATi card specifically made for Macintosh was 32MB (the original ATi Radeon Mac Edition).

Do you still have VRAM installed on the motherboard? I would try booting with the monitor connected to the built-it monitor connection... you may need an adaptor to connect it to a standard VGA monitor. I've got a 7600/120 with a 400MHz G3 upgrade card here running off of the built-in video port, and it works fine. If you happened to install a PC video card that isn't compatible with Macintosh computers, then you may not be able to get video out of that card.
 
Sorry its not the ATI card but I emailed the guy a bought it off of and he said it was pulled from a powermac 7600 the same as mine
but the onboard plug doesnt work either with the convertor or without it
I tried everything so far and even booted without the vram in on the logic board P.S. thanks for all the help so far!!
 
have you replaced the pram battery? also, are you using the stock cpu card, or an upgrade? in my old 7500, there were times it acted like that untill i put the stock cpu back in, booted to the desktop(it aways worked with the stock card), shutdown, reinstalled the upgrade (sonnet g4/450) and then it would boot as normal. there are just times that these old world macs want to be oridinal again, and then they be happy to run upgraded. i have no clue why, but it always worked for me.
 
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