Help G4 Won't boot just a grey screen.

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matt3224matt3224
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Okay so last week i get a G4 for my old man its a tower (400mhz processor), anyway i erased and installed tiger all went fine then about 2 days ago after it had been working fine, when you turn it on theres a grey screen (no apple logo and it won't boot anything, cannot get into Open Firmware). i opened it up and took out the cmos battery, then held down the button that completely powers down the logic board. Once i had done this and put the battery back in and hooked it up to the mains voila! it worked but then the next morning the grey screen was back. it seems when you leave it off for a longish amount of time ( 4-6hours+) you get the grey screen but if you just shut it down and started it up or did a restart it's fine. i have replaced the battery on the board but this has not fixed the problem.

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  • Reply 1 of 1
    rokcet scientistrokcet scientist Posts: 962member
    Perhaps an I/O port gone wonky? Grey screen usually means it's not getting any data from the HD or DVD drive to start up. So your HD could be going. Or your HD is fine, but the data isn't getting through to the CPU. Through the I/O port (often shared with the DVD drive) which is on the motherboard, afaik... Can you start up from a bootable DVD, like Tiger's install disk? Hold Command-C while starting up until you see the spinning wheel on a grey background. Then let go and see if it completes Startup.



    If it does you can run Disk Utilities from it to inspect and repair the G4 if necessary. Repair Permissions anyway!
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