• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

IIci takes several minutes just to START booting...

olePigeon

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 14, 2009
Messages
1,259
Location
Silicon Valley
I have a IIci I've been reconditioning (may have noticed my other posts regarding some of the Nubus cards I've acquired for it) but I have a question about its boot process.

When I hit the power button on the keyboard, the screen goes gray like normal, but it sits there for probably 4 full minutes (not exaggerating), then it chimes, then it seems to boot normally.

After it's booted, I can reboot and it works as expected: reboots, chimes, then boots quickly.

Is this normal operation for a IIci?

It does have 128MBs of RAM, so I thought maybe it was checking the RAM. I remember in OS 9 I could turn that off. On newer machines it seemed to do the RAM check after the chime, though.
 
Guess I'll have to buy a multimeter.

So I take it this isn't normal.

I did replace the 3.6v battery. Radio Shack wanted $22 for the battery, I got one at Fry's Electronics for $4.95.

I'll check the power supply, if that works out fine, I guess I'll need to track down a new motherboard. :(
 
Don't know if it's a 555 timer or a schmidt trigger to provide reset on a IIci, but if the reset cap is leaky, it can take a few minutes to plate itself back up & take a charge.
Look at the main reset line before board swapping.
 
What? No, it's totally normal for any Mac II with so much memory to have a very long self-test (grey screen with no other activity). Four minutes is about what it takes with 128 MB. Even the IIfx takes what seems an eternity with that much memory.
 
I just thought of a simple test I'm going to try when I get home.

I'm gonna take all the RAM out except for a couple sticks, see if it boots faster. *insert duh smiley*

(Plus, I didn't understand a single thing nige the hippy said.)
 
I'm gonna take all the RAM out except for a couple sticks, see if it boots faster. *insert duh smiley*

You need at least one bank of four SIMMs in the IIci. That's still 64 MB, if it has 128 MB now. It'll still take a while, but should chime faster than it does now.
 
My IIci also takes quite a while after having replaced the twenty megs of ram with 128. With 32 it was fast as before, but the 16 meg modules seem to slow down the boot process quite a bit.
 
Back
Top