Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / March 2006

I just had this problem.

executive summary:  I think its likely that your PRAM battery is bad and
needs to be replaced.

longer explanation:  I had weird booting problems for a couple of years,
including the symptoms you describe, off and on.  This last time it just
stopped booting from a known good hard drive, and sometimes would not
boot off an OSX install CD and other times would get hung partway
through booting from a CD.  Zapping PRAM and resetting the PMU did
nothing.  I replaced my PRAM battery and it booted normally again.

Your PRAM battery (a collection of 6 cells) is designed to hold the PRAM
data for 5-10 minutes while you change batteries or get your power
adaptor out to plug it in.  It does not preserve RAM, just the PRAM.  
PRAM controls lots of things about the boot process and if the PRAM
battery is bad, it can lose track of how and where to boot.  Yours
battery is 7 years old.

Short term, you can likely disconnect all power (remove all batteries
and the external power) for half an hour and try again and it should
boot off the CD.  If you have a Cardbus card for firewire and an
external CD or DVD drive you could also attach that and try booting off
it.  The good news is, if it got to the point of displaying the flashing
disk icon, then your wallstreet passed all its hardware checks, and its
likely that the problem is just a scrambled PRAM.

Once you render your system bootable again, you should be able to test
the PRAM battery by booting, making sure the date and time are correct
and shutting down.  Remove all power cords and batteries and let it sit
for 5-10 minutes.  Power it back up and boot.  Is the date and time
correct?  If not, you need a new PRAM battery.  Mine actually passed
this test some of the time, but failed it sometimes too.  I just bought
PRAM battery from www.powerbookmedic.com, which is the only place I
found that offered them new, as opposed to reconditioned or even used.  
They cost about $40 new, and you'll need a small phillips head
screwdriver and a torx T-8 screwdriver to install it.  They should send
you a PDF of the take apart manual for a WallStreet as part of your
purchase, but if you don't have access to a working mac with a printer,
that's kind of useless.  Apple certified repair techs should be willing
to install a new one (that you supply) for you for about $45 (I hour
labor charge) if you don't want to tackle this yourself.  You can get an
idea of what's involved by looking here:

    http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/3.0.0.html

which is what I followed it taking mine apart.

I've upgraded my Wallstreet (40 gig drive, 512 Meg RAM, sonnet G4/500
processor, new PRAM battery) over the last several years and have
Panther (10.3.9) running well on it using the latest XPostFacto.

rus

Boot from your 10.1 disk and try Disk Utility.  BTW, 10.2 is better. :-D