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From The Road Warrior Archive: On Hardware Failures And Low End File Recovery

The Archive pick for this week was first published in August, 2002, just after the processor fried in my then 3 1/2 year old WallStreet PowerBook. What I didn't know at the time but was able to confirm later was that the fault was indeed with the processor, and the fix was the simple matter of installing another processor daughtercard, which I did after someone kindly supplied me with a surplus one.

The old WallStreet never missed a beat after that. I used it for a couple of years as my utility laptop for composing and editing away from my main workstation, after which my wife took it over as her word processing and Internet machine. The original battery finally croaked in the early winter days of December, 2007 - just shy of nine years is none too shappy for a Lithium Ion laptop battery. MY wife took over my old G3 iBook at that point, and last month my daughter borrowed the old WS to use as an Internet computer, so the WallStreet has had several lives after the patch of contretemps chronicled in the column below.

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On Hardware Failures And Low End File Recovery

More on my WallStreet meltdown and how I retreived my non backed up files

As I reported on Applelinks on Friday, my heretofore faithful WallStreet PowerBook after never missing a beat in more than three and a half years of daily use, suddenly died last Wednesday afternoon with no warning.

To recap, the only unusual circumstance was that Wednesday was our hottest day of the summer here so far, and near the end of my morning work session the PowerBook's cooling fan cut in for the first time since last August.

Whether that was coincidental to its demise, I can't say. I checked the internal CPU temperature with Newer Technology's Gauge Pro, and it was a relatively, modest 150 degrees -- up from the usual 135 - 140 degrees -- but hardly alarming

I put the machine to sleep, returned several hours later, and it woke normally. However, a few minutes later, the Desktop cursor stopped responding to either of the ADB mice I had connected, although, curiously, the USB trackpad still worked. A restart restored the ADB function, I did some work, and put the computer to sleep again.

Back a couple of hours later, I woke PowerBook up and began downloading some email. It froze up. MacsBug wouldn't respond, so I gave it the three finger salute (Command + Control + Power Key -- force restart).

The screen went black, but there was no startup chime, and strangely, the hard drive kept spinning. I had to pop the battery and unplug the AC adapter in order to stop the drive.

I tried the reset key combination (Control + fn + Shift + Power Key) and pressed the power key again. The chime sounded, and the startup sequence commenced, but it locked up again just before the system extensions started loading. I had to kill it once more by popping the battery and unplugging. I stuck in the original OS 8.1 System CD, repeated the reset routine, and restarted with the C key held down. The CD-ROM drive spun up, and the PowerBook started to boot from the CD, but locked up again just before the extensions began loading. I killed it again, and that was the last screen activity I've seen. Presumably, the problem was not a corrupted system, and I began to suspect the Power Manager Unit

Interestingly, the same sort of thing happened to the late Rodney Lain's WallStreet, which was purchased around the same time as mine, although his was a lot newer when it died. A reader reports that Rodney eventually parted out his WallStreet and switched to a Cube.

Anyway, I was really beginning to sweat at this point, as I hadn't done a full backup of my files for more than two weeks; deadlines were looming, and I couldn't get at a lot of work in progress or my email files.

The way I handle backups is to just keep the two PowerBooks synchronized via my Ethernet network, dragging files from one machine to the other, but I had been a bit lazy lately about keeping up with it, being summer and all.

The problem now was how to transfer my files from WallStreet's hard drive to my Pismo PowerBook, provided the hard drive wasn't the culprit in my problems, and I didn't think it was.

I decided that the most likely workaround would be to try installing the hard drive in the case of my daughter's VST 810 MB expansion bay hard drive for her PowerBook 5300, and then proceed from there if the 5300 would mount the 10GB Toshiba drive.

It's relatively easy to remove the hard drive from the WallStreet, a five minute job, but I had a bit of a tussle getting the VST drive case open, thanks to a couple of hidden screws. Once it was apart however, the WallStreet's drive slipped in nicely. We inserted the module into the 5300's expansion bay and booted. No problem. My 4 partitions and the contents of my desktop crowded the 5300's little 9.5 inch grayscale screen.

Now, how to move the files to the Pismo, which has no SCSI port, so SCSI Disk Mode was not an option. We also have no Ethernet card for the 5300, so that route wouldn't be possible either. I decided to try connecting the 5300 to my you UMAX S.-900 desktop machine via SCSI Disk Mode, then to transfer the files to the Pismo via either Ethernet, or by little QPS Que! M2 FireWire hard drive.

I haven't done a lot with SCSI recently, and it's probably about four years since I used SCSI Disk Mode with the 5300, so there was a bit of a scramble to round up the necessary cables and adapters. I recalled that the only way I had ever been able to get the 5300 to work in SCSI Disk Mode was too route the SCSI connection in and out of my scanner, which was turned on first to power the SCSI bus before booting the PowerBook with the 30 pin SCSI dock adapter inserted. Without the SCSI bus powered up like this first, the 5300 would refuse to boot into SCSI Disk Mode.

That meant I needed two SCSI cables with Centronix 50 connectors on one end and D 25 connectors on the other. I had one for the scanner, but the one I used to use for this purpose had disappeared. Fortunately, my daughter had one for her Panasonic external CD-ROM drive, so we were in business. Or almost. I also had to find an in-line SCSI terminator to splice between the SCSI cable and the SCSI dock adapter before the connection would work.

Finally the PowerBook's internal hard drive showed up on the S-900's monitor in SCSI disk mode, but the Toshiba drive in the expansion bay did not. There is doubtless a technical reason for this; but I don't know what it is. Presumably, the fact that the expansion bay drive is ATA/IDE and not SCSI would have some bearing on it. (The internal drive in the 5300 is ATA/IDE as well, but the PowerBook itself supports SCSI).

OK, that wasn't going to work. Plan B was to just hook up the 5300 to my external SCSI Zip drive, and transfer the files by Zip disk. The Pismo has an expansion bay Zip drive, and as it turned out, the transfer of files was accomplished in this manner in whole lot more time than I had wasted fooling around with SCSI Disk Mode.

I discovered that OS X doesn't support HFS standard formatted Zip disks, so I had to reboot into OS 9.1 in order to transfer the data to the Pismo's hard drive. Mission accomplished. I would have been in a bad bind if my daughter had been home for the summer with her trusty old 5300 and its expansion bay hard drive. I'm thinking I should get some sort of hard drive enclosure that supports ATA/IDE 2.5 in. hard drives for possible future incidents.

Anyway, I'm back in business for production with the Pismo, and the old UMAX has been pressed back into service as my backup computer. However, I'm not inclined to give up on the WallStreet -- or at least a Wall Street.

I've been receiving a lot of suggestions for readers since I related my tale of woe on Applelinks Friday, and I'm mulling over my options. I've discovered (reader tip) that Wagener Media sells WallStreet PMU boards for $55, which isn't too bad a price, a lot less than I had earlier been informed. That would be quite doable if the PMU is indeed the problem. It certainly seems so, but I'm not 100 percent sure.

Since the immediate issue of getting my files transferred was resolved, I have tried:

Various procedures, sequences and combinations using the Control + fn + Shift + Power Key reset, waiting, and then pressing the Power Key again, with and without the battery inserted or the AC adapter connected or both.

Removing the RAM upgrade from the upper RAM slot, and replacing the lower S)-DIMM module with the original 32 MB module that the machine shipped with.

At a reader's suggestion, I also tried to bring up Open Firmware (Command + Option + o + f), to reset it (reset-all), but no response there either.

The fan still comes on and the sleep light flashes momentarily, but that's it. While I can't say for sure, it does seem most likely that the power manager unit is fried. However, one anomaly noticed is that the black metal spacer cap that covers the CPU chip and contacts the heat sink fell off when we removed the processor daughtercard to get at the lower RAM slot. That would seem to be a possible heat-related issue as well.

It appears that this WallStreet isn't as tough as I thought it was. It has been admirably trouble-free up to this point, but this is the worst (and only major) hardware failure I've ever experienced with a Mac.

I remember back when the G3 Series PowerBooks were introduced in 1998, some commentator suggested that the high internal temperatures they generated didn't bode well for long-term component life. The old 5300, on the other hand, runs very cool, which may be one reason why it just keeps going and going like the Energizer bunny. My Pismo also runs about 15° - 20° cooler than the WallStreet, thanks in part, I'm told, to a water-filled internal heat diffuser that bleeds heat away from the CPU.

The heat issue is one reason (a flat wallet is another) that I have hesitated about G4 processor upgrades for these machines. As I have droned on about tiresomely, the ideal upgrade for these machines would be a fast, IBM G3 750FX chip. For a bit of comparison, a 1 GHz 750FX draws a modest 4.5 W. Motorola's 7410 "Nitro" 667 MHz G4 chip draws 6.3 W. -- about 40 percent more at less than three-quarters the clock speed. And the 800 MHz 7445 G4 chip wants a whopping 11.2 W. For cool running high-performance in a portable machine, IBM's 750FX "Sahara" chip would seem to be a no-brainer. But what do I know?

At this writing, my options regarding the WallStreet seem to be:

1. Order a new Power Manager board from Wagener Media for $55.

2. Round up a good WallStreet chassis and motherboard and swap in the good stuff from my WallStreet.

3. Find a good used WallStreet at a reasonable price in use mine for spare parts.

I'll keep you posted.


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cmoore@macopinion.com

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