Apologies in advance if this is too technical or arcane.
I have a Mac clone, a Starmax 3000/160 with 64 megs of RAM, 13 gig hard drive and running MacOS 8.6. Built in 1996. I do not have either an G3 or G4 upgrade card installed.
It has three PCI slots, none of which I have ever used.
I decided I want USB capability, so I bought a Belkin PCI card with two USB ports from Club Mac. It arrived yesterday.
I shut down the computer, removed the cover, put the card in a slot, powered back up.
No startup tones, although the power supply fan began spinning. The monitor stayed black and its power light stayed amber.
After I removed the card the computer started right back up. I went to Apple’s website and downloaded the USB driver, then installed it (although this problem is clearly below the level of the OS).
Shut back down, put the card back in. Same response (or non-response).
I tried all three slots. I tried it with the SCSI cable to my Zip drive unplugged. I tried with the hard drive and CD-ROM drive disconnected. I cleared the CMOS a few times. I tried starting with a bootable CD in the CD-ROM drive.
Same result in all cases: the computer doesn’t power up, but as soon as I remove the card it comes up just fine.
My General Questions:
- Is there anything I haven’t tried?
- Is the Starmax simply not compatible (the Apples of this generation, which also use the Tanzania architecture, are compatible, but I can’t get confirmation of the Starmax’s compatibility from Belkin, Club Mac or Motorola)?
- Is it just a bad card? Club Mac is sending me another one, but right now I don’t know if that will make any difference.
Thanks for any help, y’all.