Home Forums Hardware Mac Desktops & Notebooks iMac G4 17 in 1 ghz-intermediate startup problems

Came to me after a repair shop did not inspire confidence in the owner.

Would not power on. Replaced the power supply. Don't know if it was just failure or if there was a power surge as the owner's 1tb Iomega external died at the same time. Yes, the Iomega was Time Machine, so the iMac needed to be salvaged.

After ps replacement, odd problems like ram not being recognized, the CD/DVD player will not eject all the way, flashing question mark and folder-shades of OS 9- at startup, after may tries at cracking the case open, reseating ram, plugs etc. Found out one of the connectors the hard drive ribbon could connect to would not allow machine to boot, the other would.

Decided to repair permissions Wrong move. Whether it froze or I shut down too soon, it would not boot.

Successfully backed up to my Seagate, booted from external CD, ran fsck-hfs -r, says volume can not be repaired. Numerous tries, so wipe, format and install. Migrated owner's profiles from back up.

While it was cracked open, changed PRAM battery and upgraded the non user friendly ram stick.

Have restarted numerous times, sometimes it works, like one out of every three or four tries. Most times get folder then question mark.

Start up from install Cd run disk utility, says the volume appears to be OK.

Repaired permissions, after updating and applying security patches, only permission repaired not related to update is private/var/spool/sups/cache/rss.

Hard drive is 80-18.1 available. Leopard. 2 g ram

Worked 5 straight times here, sent it home, got it back inside of 30 minutes. When it booted-right up btw-date and time were not set. Don't know if owner zapped PRAM. Between working on it in the office and bringing it home, it retained settings.

5 days of troubleshooting-wasted? Bad logic board? Something not seated correctly? Bad PRAM battery?

> Most times get folder then question mark.

I've only given your post a cursory look, but that sticks out... Have you launched Apps/SysPrefs/Startup Disk and made certain that the volume into which you want that iMac to boot is selected?

> When it booted-right up btw-date and time were not set. Don't know if owner zapped PRAM.

Or were the settings lost when you yanked the PRAM battery to change it?

Sorry for not being clear. Battery was yanked on Thursday, Settings disappeared on Saturday. I'm now with clearer mind and some sleep and think the settings were lost when the HD was unmounted to run fsck_hfs.

Startup disk has been selected in preferences.

Got an Apple Hardware Test disc for that Mac?

Ouch. Quite a litany of problems there.

From your description, I would definitely suspect a serious hardware issue, quite likely with the logic board.

I second logic board. between not wanting to power on and problems recognizing ram, plus other issues.

It's a G4 for gods sake. time for a new computer. The owners of the 20" G4 imacs are even harder to get to upgrade because the screen was so massive at the time they bought it. (not that you can buy an imac with that small of a screen now, but try and get them to grasp that concept, eh?)

Exactly. He feels a kindred spirit is being put away. But I know the feeling, my home computer is a G4/500 Cube.

One more anomaly.

When the external CD/DVD drive is connected, it boots up everytime. No delay, screen images are just what you expect, and it boots to the internal hard drive, not the installer DVD.

I have one more experiment to try, and that is tightening the screws just a tad further. No, I don't have a torque driver, the manual calls for 17 in.-lbs