my two cents: I have worked with several quadras and 1st nubus macs mediting videos, specially 840s and 8100s. I encountered this problem (gray screen with cursor working)several times under two circumstances, the SCSI chain was giving problems or the nubus cards were giving problems.
Under the SCSI problem, we just stripped off all disks and let the mac with only the internal hard drive. It should boot perfectly, the catch here, or the assurance is that you see a cursor, hence the motherboard is perfectly alright, if any internal motherboard component is dead you should see a sad mac, end of story. The problem of Nancy I guess is getting a copy of a bootable CD or a diskette. But if the SCSI chain isn't properly installed (if the hard disk has an invalid ID, like 0 or 8 with bad jumpers, or the SCSI ribbon cable is faulty then, the mac simply won't boot beyond this screen. The other culprit were the nubus cards, case A. a perfectly working nubus video card (RADius) simply changed overnight into this problem, solution, changed the card to another slot (on the same machine) and voilá booting again... I know it´s nowhere near a scientific explanation, but I swear that was the solution, we know the nubus controller wasn't dead, because if that were true, a sad mac would have booted, or the card was wrong, because it functioned properly. So to wrap it up, it sounds to me that the motherboard is perfectly alright, check the SCSI connections, and after you checked them, check them again, and then check them some more, and I would add after all else fails, try this: insert the nubus card in every slot and try restarting it. Regards, and good lck, Nancy MAuricio __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com -- Quadlist is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Enter To Win A | -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299 | Free iBook! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Quadlist info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/quadlist.shtml> The FAQ: <http://macfaq.org/> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/quadlist%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
