[colivigan]

I scored a Pismo 500 from eBay for $95. Good deal, huh? Listing said "boots to flashing folder icon". No problem, I think, HD is bad, I'll probably replace it anyway. When it arrived, sure enough, it booted to the flashing folder icon. I successfully booted from a Tiger DVD, so figured everything was A-OK and left positive feedback.

Well, tonight I started to take it apart. First thing I noticed was that the entire heat sink assembly was missing. Uh-oh, that's really not a good idea. Then I discovered that the HD cable was unplugged from the logic board. Doh, flashing folder icon explained, right? So I plug the HD cable back in, plug in the PRAM battery (which was also unplugged) and try to fire her up (only briefly, of course, because of missing heat sink). Nothing, gray screen. Cannot boot from DVD or CD, option-boot finds no drives. Pull the hard drive, put it in an external FW enclosure, and it works fine on another Mac. Pismo now boots from CD again.

So I'm not really a hardware guy, but I'm thinking that running without the heat sink may have fried the HD controller, or something related? Does this make sense? If so, would it be worth trying to replace the logic board? Any ideas what else I should try?

I think the seller knew exactly what they were doing. Crazy like a fox.

My other Pismo (and several clamshells) are now happily running 10.4.10. And I just got a G4 Sawtooth for my Mac museum! Yay for old Macs!