Dead iMac 500 G3

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kertkert
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
My dad has an iMac 500MHz G3 CDRW MacOS 10.3.x that won't boot up. I'm away at college, so I can't look at it myself, and I'm trying to diagnose the problem.



He says it told him to restart, so he did, and all he got was a flashing ? so he went out and got another clock battery and put that in. now he still has the same problem, although he says it "turns on faster." I've had him reset the PRAM, and that didn't seem to help. He's tried booting up from a CD, and still gets a flashing ? (I think he was using a MacOS 9.1 CD because that was all he could find).



He has a couple other weird problems: First of all when he starts up it has a long beep before the normal startup chime, but he says it's been doing that. Second, ass I recall, the last time I used his computer and restarted, it went into OF mode momentarily before going to the standard happy mac.



I'd really appreciate any suggestions. I feel like I'd be able to fix it if I was there with my computer and my Panther disks, but that's not really an option right now.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    maccrazymaccrazy Posts: 2,658member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by kert

    My dad has an iMac 500MHz G3 CDRW MacOS 10.3.x that won't boot up. I'm away at college, so I can't look at it myself, and I'm trying to diagnose the problem.



    He says it told him to restart, so he did, and all he got was a flashing ? so he went out and got another clock battery and put that in. now he still has the same problem, although he says it "turns on faster." I've had him reset the PRAM, and that didn't seem to help. He's tried booting up from a CD, and still gets a flashing ? (I think he was using a MacOS 9.1 CD because that was all he could find).



    He has a couple other weird problems: First of all when he starts up it has a long beep before the normal startup chime, but he says it's been doing that. Second, ass I recall, the last time I used his computer and restarted, it went into OF mode momentarily before going to the standard happy mac.



    I'd really appreciate any suggestions. I feel like I'd be able to fix it if I was there with my computer and my Panther disks, but that's not really an option right now.



    I had the same problem, I put an old hard drive in my iMac 600Mhz and it would not start, nothing helped it, os 9 cds did nothing, nor 8, OS X CDs started and allowed me to reformat the hard drive but i could not access the information, no-one here managed to help either, good luck!! Ask Apple
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  • Reply 2 of 4
    altivec_2.0altivec_2.0 Posts: 995member
    Put a boot cd in the drive and restart while holding option down, see if that helps.
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  • Reply 3 of 4
    kertkert Posts: 9member
    Well Today I taked to my dad again, and he found an OS X CD (10.0 or 10.1 I think), and he got it to boot from the CD. I had him run Disk Utilities, which told him there was a bad sibling link and stopped. I had him restart and try again with the same result, and I had him try to start up from the hard drive, and he still gets a flashing ? so I'm still at a loss. He has another (smaller) Hard drive that he could put in that I believe has system software for the same computer, but I'd really like to be able to recover the data on his drive. I suppose he could use the other hard drive in the mean time and send his current drive somewhere to have the data recevered (not sure how much that costs).



    Tell me what you think.



    Thanks
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  • Reply 4 of 4
    maccrazymaccrazy Posts: 2,658member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by kert

    Well Today I taked to my dad again, and he found an OS X CD (10.0 or 10.1 I think), and he got it to boot from the CD. I had him run Disk Utilities, which told him there was a bad sibling link and stopped. I had him restart and try again with the same result, and I had him try to start up from the hard drive, and he still gets a flashing ? so I'm still at a loss. He has another (smaller) Hard drive that he could put in that I believe has system software for the same computer, but I'd really like to be able to recover the data on his drive. I suppose he could use the other hard drive in the mean time and send his current drive somewhere to have the data recevered (not sure how much that costs).



    Tell me what you think.



    Thanks



    That's exactly what I found when i tried to recover some data on an old hard drive. I think my problem is to do with firmeware but I can't think what your problem is. You'll have to go to a thrid party, no idea how much it'll cost, but you'll prob lose your file names as Apple names can be longer. They will be reduced in length
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