Mac Experts-Diagnosis needed

[matthew blais]

My last effort before sending my G4 Power PC in..

Symptoms: Would not boot up from either of two internal Hard drives. Just the Apple and the clock under which kept spinning.

It did boot up off the external which had the OS installed. Then, that did not work.
Took to Apple "Genius Bar" and the booted up off their 'puter, ran disk utilities, etc (as I had) then tried to boot up off my two internals-same problem.

They suggested a corrupt OS on all drives and to reformat drive/clean install.
I took out the two internal drives, installed a new internal 500 gig, OSX 9.3.3 installed fine. Booted up-same thing...spinning clock under the apple. Like the energizer bunny it just kept going and going and going...

So next I took out one of the two 1 gig ram chips (left the one in the first slot) rebooted-no change. I replaced t
he one ram chip with one I took out, rebooted, no change.

Next thing I was told to try is take out the 2906 card I have installed and try a reboot
which I have not done yet.
After that or even before, what do you wizzards suggest?

Stats: Mac G4 Power PC dual 1.47 ghz processors. The last G4 made I believe.
Firewire 800/400

It also would not recognize the airport extreme card I installed-if'n it gets back to working, any thoughts on that?

To add insult to injury, this laptop took a hard drive dump last week as well. Managed to copy files off when holding upside down which was the only position the drive would boot from. Installed new internal, reloaded and now I have one working 'puter.

Thanks in advance. No Anti-mac or "get a pc" comments please...

Matt

[Marko]

Thanks in advance. No Anti-mac or "get a pc" comments please...

How about "Get a new Mac"? It sounds like controller and/or motherboard problem to me. Since it's been more than 3 years since that Mac was new, your AppleCare would have expired by now even if you had one. So, while it may be possible to repair, you might be better off to just get a new one. It will cost you a bit more, but the improvement will be worth it, IMO.

On the side note, if I were you, I'd buy external disk enclosures for those disks you have and turn them into external FireWire drives and use them for less than critical storage for at least a few months or until you're fairly certain nothing's wrong with the drives themselves.

[Photomax]

Apple does not make hard drives so the usual debate is not worth discussing.
If you own multiple older Macs then get a copy of Discwarrior. Drives are delicate instruments that spin at high speed. They just poop out after a while. Get Smart Reporter which is a handy little Finder utility that gives a graphic color report on the condition of your drive: a must for Powerbooks etc

I like to use multiple drives with the OS and apps on one drive and all my Files on another drive. I run a mirrored drive to backup my Files drive. Super Duper is a good backup system.

What kind of drives are you using? I think OS X has requirements. This might be a motherboard issue. Still, Discwarrior is worth the $100 to have. In the end I would not spend a lot of money on an old G4 system though...

[JohnnyV]

I would think the Mac Geniuses would have zapped the pram, checked the battery and reset the pram via the Cuda/PMU button?

Have you Zapped the Pram?

How to Zap Pram from http://www.techsurvivors.net/faqs/pram_how.html:

“The Mac OS provides a procedure to do this at boot time. Reboot, then as soon as you hear the startup 'bong', hold down these four keys: Command-Option-P-R. It will bong again. And again. Continue to hold down these four keys until it has 'bonged' a total of three times (the initial startup bong and two more after you hold down those four keys).

Now your PRAM is cleaned out and uncorrupted, and the PRAM values are restored to their factory defaults.”

Also there is a good chance the computer's battery is dead. If the zapping pram doesn’t work try replacing battery and zap pram again...

Here's link to resetting using the Cuda/PMU button:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86760

On bottom of page is a link to images for your G4.

[Henry Ambrose]

Take out everything that didn't ship in the machine like your scsi card you mentioned and the airport you just put in. Got the old memory? Put that back in place of whats there now.

Remove the processors and re-seat. Some have resets on the processor. Read up about this at Apple's support pages.

After all the above, try to boot it.

Will it run in Firewire disk mode when attached to another Mac?
If so then prod and poke it with disk utility while in FW mode.

If its still dead, its hardware, so try these guys:

http://www.dttservice.com/

I have not bought anything from them for a while but they used to have MB and power supplies pretty reasonable. They would be a likely choice for repair. Apple is liable to so expensive your head will spin around.

Good luck.

[Jack Flesher]

No Anti-mac or "get a pc" comments please...

Why is it that Mac guys *ALWAYS* add this comment when posting on issues with their machines, but when somebody posts a PC issue, they are the first to say, "Get a Mac!"

Seriously, computer issues totally suck regardless of machine, so best of luck in getting it fixed soon!

Cheers,

[matthew blais]

I did Pram, also opened case and removed battery and pressed Cudo biutton for abouot 20-30 seconds.

The G4 is a beautiful machine...yes it's "old" byputer standards, but in lieu of spending 1500-1700 on a new iMac, which is the route I'd go, am trying to revive it.

I did remove the two drives and bought external cases for them to use as storage..

I'm unsure of how to remove and replace processor chips Henry (??)
I'm pretty sure the original memory chips are gone...then again, I think it came with the one 1 gig and I added the second.

I'll try the firewire but the disk is new and OSX installed fine...anything to avoid apple repair.

Jack Jack Jack...what can I say?

[Ted Harris]

It's been a long time since I had a G4 in front of me but .... assuming my memory is correct and I am pretty sure it is ..... there is a system reseet button on the motherboard. The motherboard is somewhere in the upper right of the machine and the reset button is a little green button that will push with a definite "push feel" to it. That should do the job if the machine is salvagable.

[Henry Ambrose]

Matthew,

Check around at Apple support or maybe a supplier of cpu upgrades for info on re-seating your processors. I've not had your exact machine apart. My old G4 is much older and they changed. But basically you can unplug and replug like memory chips. Yours may be paired on a daughter card that can unplug. I don't know for sure.

If it started from the install CD when you installed OSX on the 500GB drive then its -maybe- not totally dead. If you can't do anything else contact the DT&T guys and ask them what's going on.

That G4 isn't that bad a machine so if you can fix it for a couple hundred, you saved yourself some big bucks. And it'll always be good to run a scanner or be your back up machine for next time things go kaput.

[matthew blais]

Thanks for all the input.

I'll try a few more things than whip out the plastic if all fails...