Q: Safe boot only, no sound or airport
eMac 2005, 1.42 GHz, 1gb RAM, PowerMac 6,4 Power PC G4 HD 150gb.
The machine has been lying idle for a month or so, and when I turned it on a few days ago it booted to a blue screen, no "starting Mac OS" progress bar, and then it turned black and had to be powered down.
Boots into Safe mode only and won't boot from clone on Firewire drive or from internal startup disk. Will boot from original install disk so I used Disk Utility there to verify the startup disk -- no problems found -- and to repair Permissions.
What I've tried:
* replaced the 3.6V backup battery -- was down to less than 1V -- and reset the PMU.
* reset PRAM, and also NVRAM using the terminal commands after booting to Command Option o f. When it restarted it was the blue screen again.
* started in Single User mode and did fcsk -fy which found nothing wrong with the startup disk.
* also in Single User mode did the sh /etc/rc command for booting and staying in SU mode which showed a lot of info. What caught my eye in particular was "Boot Cache Control -- could not start cache resource busy" and "Boot Cache: cache init failed." Also, further down was a whole bunch of mDNSResponder errors saying "ERROR unknown opt 4"
In Safe mode, System Preferences/Sound say "No output devices found" and the Sound effects are all greyed out.
In System Prefs / Network there is no Airport, although Airport was working before on an Airport Extreme card.
Airport setup says "No Airport card installed" although it is installed and was working a few weeks ago.
In Audio Midi, it says output and input not supported, as well as "default output -- none" and the same for input. However, the startup chime sounds so the speakers must be OK.
Does all this mean that the Video card is gone kaput? I don't know much about the tech side and how this knocks out the sound and the startup functions. Looking for enlightenment.
I've had this eMac for 10 years or so and it was mostly used for Internet browsing and some audio and iMovie editing but nothing very heavy. Also for Appleworks 6 occasionally. Would hate to have to throw it away.
MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), mid-2012 13inch, 4gb RAM, 250gb SSD
Posted on Sep 25, 2016 11:51 PM