Failing PowerPC system...

[Jarod Wilson]

On Thursday 13 March 2008 12:23:18 am Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 00:01 -0400, Jarod Wilson wrote:
[OS X lockups and sha1sum failures under linux on ppc mac]
> > So anyone have suggestions for diagnosing exactly what component is
> > starting to fail? My first thought was cpu, then motherboard, and now
> > memory... I figure memory is probably the easiest place to start poking,
> > but is there a memtest86 equivalent for PowerPC? If not, I guess its
> > memory stick roulette, and on to other hardware from there. Open to any
> > and all suggestions...
>
> RAM is definitely the first place to look.  You also might just want to
> take the RAM out and firmly reseat it.  That's fixed these sorts of
> things for me a few times before.
>
> If you have the original CDs the machine came with, the Apple Hardware
> Test CD should have a RAM tester on it.  Unfortunately, most of the
> hardware test CDs have special builds only for the machine they came
> with, so you can't just use any old one.

I'd forgot all about that CD... Amazingly enough, despite the machine being as 
old as it is and having survived two moves, I actually found the original 
media kit w/o a problem. Unfortunately, the CD fails to boot up all the way. 
It starts loading up something (little Mac Classic logo in the middle of the 
screen w/some chips and tools around it), but then dumps me to open firmware, 
where (3x now) I get the following:

DEFAULT CATCH!, code=300  at %SRR0: 0073cf88 %SRR1: 00003030

Oh, and the 3rd time I encountered this was after pulling all the memory, 
blowing out the slots and putting the memory back in, rotated and firmly 
seated. Suck.

Just found http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/ and will see if that 
builds/runs/does something useful under ppc32 linux or os x... There's also a 
non-free (but fairly cheap at $1.39) memtest os x at http://memtestosx.org/.


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jwilson at redhat.com