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- From: rgonzal@gandalf.rutgers.edu (Ralph Gonzalez)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware,comp.sys.mac.system
- Subject: Re: Strange Tone Sequence During Startup.
- Message-ID: <Aug.26.16.24.26.1992.18538@gandalf.rutgers.edu>
- Date: 26 Aug 92 20:24:26 GMT
- References: <1992Aug26.134325.2096@galileo.cc.rochester.edu>
- Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.hardware
- Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
- Lines: 40
-
- npl@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu (Nicholas LaMendola) writes:
-
- >I have a most frustrating problem with my Mac SE/30 at home. Last night, I was
- >using Excel 3.0 on my Mac and got a system bomb due to a "divide by zero" in
- >the Finder. This did not alarm me since I have seen it before, and proceeded
- >to simply hit the offered Restart button. When it restarted, I heard the normal
- >tone it makes upon startup and then saw the background being drawn, but then
- >instead of seeing the icon to denote that it had located the startup file, I
- >heard a strange 4-tone sequence that sounds exactly like the annoying "Your
- >attention, please" tone given at Charles de Gaulle airport, and then nothing.
-
- Almost the same thing happened to me Saturday. I got a system crash, rebooted,
- had it crash during the startup sequence, and then I was unable to boot from
- the HD or from a floppy. Instead, I got a slow 4-note musical scale, which
- I am told is a diagnostic sound indicating that something is seriously
- wrong!
-
- I paged through Larry Pina's "Dead Mac Scrolls" and learned that the
- problem may be simply a dust-short on the logic board. So I bought a
- dust sprayer at Radio Shack, opened the case, and sprayed everything.
- That didn't work -- still got the 4-note scale.
-
- I also tried disconnecting everything from the CPU - external HD, printer,
- modem, video card. Still broke. At the suggestion of a technician, I
- tried removing some of the RAM SIMMS (making sure I still had a legal
- arrangement - all of bank A should be full of the same kind of SIMMS)
- and then removing the other SIMMS and restoring the ones I removed
- first. The idea is that this problem is sometimes caused by a bad SIMM.
- (Since I have 4x1Mb SIMMS and 4x256k, I first put all the 1Mb ones in
- bank A and tried a restart, then put all the 256k ones in bank A and
- tried again.) No dice.
-
- So I dropped it off at the shop. Sure hope it doesn't cost much!!!!!!
-
- -Ralph
-
- --
- Ralph Gonzalez, Computer Science, Rutgers Univ., Camden, NJ
- Phone: (609) 757-6122; Internet: rgonzal@elbereth.rutgers.edu
- --
-