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| Author | My IIci and the chime of death adventure (Read 38296 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bolkonskij
Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023 
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on: October 19, 2023, 10:14
As I had posted in the Hypercard Challenge thread, yesterday my beloved IIci gave me some headache. For the first time! It's otherwise a rock-solid machine that runs several hours nearly every day. What happened? I've had the IIci connected to Usenet and running Wallops for chat when it suddenly froze. I rebooted. Ran several programs again for another 5 minutes, when it froze again. This time I got the "chime of death" when trying to restart it. Shudder! What could it be? RAM? The Processor upgrade card? The PSU? Logicboard? I had the PSU and Logicboard professionally recapped 2 years ago. The RAM is actually new 2022 RAM I bought from an individual from the 68kmla forum. And the processor upgrade card was built by Mac community member 'Bolle' just 2-3 years ago. So most components in my IIci are rather "new". I unplugged the machine and let it rest. I also shut down the PiSCSI (formerly RaSCSI) connected to it and went for dinner. After I came back half an hour later, I restarted the IIci. Lo and behold, it jumped back to life with no issue? Everything working as expected, sans the networking through the PiSCSI. I had the IIci running for two more hours, doing Quicktime playback in the background to see when it'd freeze. Also asked the kids to play some rounds of Shanghai II just to see if it'd crash again. It wouldn't. Talk about strange symptoms, right? Since it does run, I have a feeling that it might be either the recapped PSU starting to fail or the RAM being faulty (which causes the issue when the faulty registers are written to / read from) I'm now running GURU doing the Memory Integrity Test to see if there's any issue. After all, it found the faulty RAM in knezzen's 8600 before. Any helpful suggestions appreciated. |
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Last Edit: October 19, 2023, 10:16 by Bolkonskij
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68040
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512 MB  Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #1 on: October 19, 2023, 10:35
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Maybe a file system/disk error? I found that sometimes even corrupted resource forks/desktop DB files can cause my system to freeze up on me unpredictably. And the system's own disk repair tool doesn't always catch that.
Last Edit: October 19, 2023, 10:36 by 68040
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ovalking
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128 MB Posts: 199
Reply #2 on: October 19, 2023, 11:18
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>Everything working as expected, sans the networking through the PiSCSI. I think this is your biggest clue. SCSI is notoriously delicate, and often responsible for unpredictable bad behaviour. For example, I have an external HD that makes my P475 a sad Mac, but only when I boot from a specific internal drive. All other combinations are fine!t
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #3 on: October 19, 2023, 13:35
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So, "unfortunately" it wasn't the RAM. I've run the Memory Integrity Test for an hour and after 200 passes gave up. Looks like it's not a defective RAM module. Bummer. That would have been easy to replace. @ovalking - thanks. What I find odd is that the IIci has been running with the PiSCSI for more than a year. Why all of a sudden? It's odd. We will get to know when I restart the PiSCSI with the IIci tonight. @68040 - thanks! I'd assume a system disk error would lead to a corrupted drive, maybe non-bootable anymore. But it isn't. I got the death chime, which - to the best of my knowledge - indicates an imminent hardware issue?
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mac-cellar
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128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7
Reply #4 on: October 19, 2023, 18:09
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@Bolkonskij - This reminds of a "chime of death" situation I had earlier this year on my Quadra 610. I connected a new Mac-VGA adapter and VGA cable to connect to a different flatscreen than the one I normally use. The machine booted fine the first time and ran for a while until it froze up. When I went to reboot, it gave the chime of death. It chimed again and again on each successive attempt to reboot. I disconnected/reconnected the video cables several times, but nothing worked. When I switched back to the monitor cabling I had been using prior to this episode, the Quadra 610 booted normally. Very strange! The Quadra hasn't had a chime of death since this episode.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #5 on: October 19, 2023, 21:31
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I've had the Finder freeze on me at the most unfortunate moments, only to find out through trial & error that it was all caused by some minor resource corruption. But YMMV on real HW and the best suggestion I could make right now is to install a few system monitoring apps. I know there is one on the garden that keeps a watch out for SCSI faults, disk faults, RAM access errors a.s.o. Too bad I can;t remember its name, because even so its 68k I have no real use for it, giving that I ran on all emulated hardware.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #6 on: October 22, 2023, 12:22
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Quote from: mac-cellar This reminds of a "chime of death" situation I had earlier this year on my Quadra 610. I connected a new Mac-VGA adapter and VGA cable to connect to a different flatscreen than the one I normally use. The machine booted fine the first time and ran for a while until it froze up. When I went to reboot, it gave the chime of death. It chimed again and again on each successive attempt to reboot. I disconnected/reconnected the video cables several times, but nothing worked. That's precisely what I experienced. Each reboot resulted in a chime of death. I had to unplug and leave it alone for some time. That said, everything is working again. I had the PiSCSI connected and ran the IIci for about 2 hours yesterday, running MT-Newswatcher, iCab, Wallops, Hypercard etc... no issue at all. This is very strange. I wonder what might have been the cause of the issue. In any case, it's a good idea to get a full backup today ...
Last Edit: October 22, 2023, 17:47 by Bolkonskij
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Knezzen
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Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot
Reply #7 on: October 22, 2023, 16:35
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Very strange indeed.
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