Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!nuug!symbas!tag
From: tag@symbas.UUCP (Arne Gisvold)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: MAC II serial port problems
Message-ID: <1598@symbas.UUCP>
Date: 14 Feb 90 06:43:54 GMT
References: <23884@ipl.jpl.nasa.gov>
Reply-To: tag@symbas.UUCP (Tor Arne Gisvold)
Organization: Symbiotic Computer Systems A/S, Trondheim, Norway
Lines: 36

In article <23884@ipl.jpl.nasa.gov> tcg060@ipl.jpl.nasa.gov (Tom Greer) writes:
>HELP!
>For the fourth time in my Mac II's life, the modem port has died.  The 
>first two times, it "healed" itself.  Once, right in front of the Mac 
>repair person.  The next time, my Mac was taken away for a week and then
>returned with the comment that nothing was wrong... except for my hard disk
>which crashed when the repair folks dropped it.  
>
>Has anyone seen this?  Know a simple fix?
>
>--- Tom Greer
>--- JPL Image Processing Lab, tcg060@ipl.jpl.nasa.gov

Yes - I have seen this severeal times, and always in conjunction with
"ill-behaved" communications programs or terminal emulators.(Such as
Versaterm Pro). Some of
these seem to lock out the serial port they are using in such a way
that if the program crashes out or is abnormally terminated the serial
port will hang next time any program tries to use it.

I suspect that they leave some information in the PRAM, but cannot be
sure about this. The only way I have found to gain access to the port
has been to run AppleCat (Apples diagnostics programs) on the machine.
This is presumably exactly what your dealer is doing, and AppleCat
fixes this problem during its setup phase, and therefore the dealer
will not find any problems.


Regards
Tor-Arne Gisvold

-- 
!  Tor-Arne Gisvold   -   Symbiotic Computer Systems A/S
!  adress : Sandgt. 2 ,  N7001 Trondheim, Norway
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