powermac g5 stuck at grey apple screen

have had some of the same issues recently, minus the startup from DVD part. stuck at grey screen, machine thinking, fans rev up like a Boeing, then have to force a power down and hope it starts up correctly next time.

hopefully it's not the dreaded power supply problem about to happen....

any HELP?!?!

This similar thing just happened to me. The computer was not doing anything special. I just rebooted and it sat at the gray apple screen with the spinning wheel. After about 3 or 4 minutes, the fans start going like a jet plane. It will sit there as long as I leave it on and will go no further. Just for the heck of it, I upgraded the tiger that was on there to leopard. It booted. I cloned to a new 500 Gb hdd and it was fine for several hours. After installing some software and rebooting, it sat there doing the same thing again.

I also tried swapping out the memory.

Anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

I would love to get this machine up and running.

Hey,

Same thing here.
We got this problem last week as well
We took it to Apple and they changed battery. Got it back today - 4 hours fine - and then it crashed big and after boot freeze.

any ideas?

thanks,
Janne

pretty sure it's not the battery, then ;o)

i really think that it's the power supply about to go boom, like the system can't power up all of the peripherals, etc, so it just hangs...waiting...waiting...

it's scary to think,however, that we are all on the brink of disaster. i might just replace the power supply, which is a $200 part.

Ours is doing the same thing.

Does apple stock the power supply or would I need to get it from somewhere else??

I am having the exact same problem. This all began in the beginning of October.
I cannot get passed the grey apple screen. Have tried erasing hard drive and re-installing. Taken it to Apple stores three times now, they cannot find anything wrong with it on tests. When you run tests on it, everything says its ok.....***!
I think I need to take it back to the apple repair and just tell them to try replacing the power supply. The computer runs fine if I can ever get it to boot correctly, and then it will just randomly freeze with no response and will not re-boot correctly. I have tried basically everything I can find on this site, it has to be a hardware problem. Kind of odd that alot of others are having similar problems...

Same problem here. G5 working fine until I decided to upgrade to 10.5. The grey screen and the fans racing, unable to get disc out of drive. Powered down but even after unplugging get the same screen..

scratching my head...

Here's a tray opening faq.
The rest of you who can startup,

Try using Disk Utility to do a Disk Repair, as shown in this link, while booted up on your install disk.
You could have some directory corruption. Let us know what errors Disk Utility reports and if DU was able to repair them.

 Cheers! DALE

Hi Dale - I ran the Disk Repair utility from the original software DVD. It took over 3.5 hours (mostly spent on 4.5GB of memory), but all was good. Also ran Diskwarrior from the disc. Corrected a bunch of permissions that the Apple Disk Utility didn't fix. Odd.

I'm personally not stuck on the startup screen, but often come out of sleep to a scrambled screen. I then have to force a shutdown by holding the power button, but then when i startup i get caught at the grey apple screen with the fans going nuts. I have to then force shutdown and startup until i finally get to the login screen. Ugh.

Message was edited by: host

thanks for the link... got the disk out,repaired the HD ( a few corrupted files) and ran Apple Hardware repair... without problem . Will now try to install OS 10.5 on the G5. One mistake I was making was to try to install the new system using the bluetooth keyboard and mouse. So I couldn't select or choose anything during the startup process. Which is probably why I couldn't eject the disk in the first place..live and learn

Marilyn