iMac G4 boot problem
Hi all, new to posting here. Have posted on Apple discussion site but there's clearly a much more active community here and I'm pulling my hair out of this. :P
I recently got this iMac (700mhz) from school in supposedly "broken" condition. When I got it it would not boot, displaying a grey screen only. Did the usuals, resetting PRAM and PMU. Also booted to apple diagnostic CD, ran an extensive test and they all passed. I have successfully booted it to an ancient ubuntu live CD as well.
I have stripped it down to clean out and remove loose change and other debris from the CD drive, whilst doing this I tested the CD-RW drive and Hard drive in another machine, they are both fine.
Now as the problem stands.... I installed Tiger (4 CD version), it worked fine, did software update and it hung (although the mouse still moved) while finishing the OSX combined update. I restarted it and it failed to boot, just sticking on the apple, no spinning icon or anything. I tried safe boot and single user booth but no keyboard commands did anything. Assuming I had mucked it up I installed Tiger again... reformatting the drive (journaled) and verifying it. Setup completed and I used tiger for a bit with no issues, ran software update, this time not selecting the OS X update, I let the two updates complete, one of them required restarting, I chose to shut it down. Once it had shut down I switched it on again and it hung on the Apple, no hard drive activity or anything. I reset the PRAM and this brings me to now, the spinning icon under the apple has appeared and it has been spinning for about half an hour now with no other activity.
Since That I have restarted again and it's got past the screen with the apple and it's now a light blue screen with the same spinning icon, definitely no activity...
Luckily I cloned the harddrive before running software updates after what happened last time.
I don't know why it's doing this though as it's done it twice now and obviously I can't be reinstalling or transferring the hard drive over whenever I want to restart it!
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Ollie
I recently got this iMac (700mhz) from school in supposedly "broken" condition. When I got it it would not boot, displaying a grey screen only. Did the usuals, resetting PRAM and PMU. Also booted to apple diagnostic CD, ran an extensive test and they all passed. I have successfully booted it to an ancient ubuntu live CD as well.
I have stripped it down to clean out and remove loose change and other debris from the CD drive, whilst doing this I tested the CD-RW drive and Hard drive in another machine, they are both fine.
Now as the problem stands.... I installed Tiger (4 CD version), it worked fine, did software update and it hung (although the mouse still moved) while finishing the OSX combined update. I restarted it and it failed to boot, just sticking on the apple, no spinning icon or anything. I tried safe boot and single user booth but no keyboard commands did anything. Assuming I had mucked it up I installed Tiger again... reformatting the drive (journaled) and verifying it. Setup completed and I used tiger for a bit with no issues, ran software update, this time not selecting the OS X update, I let the two updates complete, one of them required restarting, I chose to shut it down. Once it had shut down I switched it on again and it hung on the Apple, no hard drive activity or anything. I reset the PRAM and this brings me to now, the spinning icon under the apple has appeared and it has been spinning for about half an hour now with no other activity.
Since That I have restarted again and it's got past the screen with the apple and it's now a light blue screen with the same spinning icon, definitely no activity...
Luckily I cloned the harddrive before running software updates after what happened last time.
I don't know why it's doing this though as it's done it twice now and obviously I can't be reinstalling or transferring the hard drive over whenever I want to restart it!
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Ollie
Comments
Eeep... My powerbook does not like the drive at all when I target disk mode it and connect by firewire. Will try a new hard drive and see how that goes.
if it's not the HD, could it be the RAM? do you have similar ones to try it out with?
You can't start up from an installer DVD?