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Level 1

28 points

Uh-oh... Boot failure, out of the blue

Got nothing but a loud fan sound when I turned on my G5's power this morning. No chime, nothing.

I forced shutdown by holding the power button; then I disconnected the power cord for a minute.

Next boot was completely normal, and it has been running quietly and happily for a couple of hours. (The only thing I did differently was to turn off my external G-Drive before starting up. I seriously doubt that's relevant, but thought I should mention it.)

Should I be concerned? Did it likely just need its PMU reset for some reason (if memory serves as to what the power disconnect does)?

My one other worry about this Mac is that it seems memory-challenged lately, but that happens mostly, if not always, when I have been working on my increasingly media-intensive MySpace profile. The computer has only 1 GB of RAM.

PPC G5 2.0, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Nov 22, 2008 11:25 AM

18 replies

Nina R Author

Level 1

28 points

Jan 31, 2009 11:08 AM in response to The hatter

The hatter wrote:
Nothing against Apple Diagnostics but the best utility is WD's own for their drives, which are only available for linux and Windows.

That (as you may know) is what's in my machine now: WDC WD2500JS-41MVB1

zero the drive.

Dare I say your heavy Windows exposure is showing? J/K... you're probably right and it can't hurt, except for the time sink of course, to launch into my curve of learning how to actually use those Time Machine backups I've been saving 🙂.

WD Black Caviar 640GB, though OWC doesn't have it, so get the regular Blue.
http://www.barefeats.com/hard112.html

I'll look at that. By the way, your post here is a good one:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7479466&#7479466

I didn't know about the MacGurus forum you mentioned there, so I went to check it out and found an interesting thread about another no-chime boot failure case.
http://www.macgurus.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13867

This was a G4, but still worth reading for me. I like to try to get the "gestalt" of things I'm wrestling with.

I love Uncle Mac's signature on that forum: "Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining. -- Jef Raskin"

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Jan 31, 2009 1:30 PM in response to Nina R

I never touched Windows until 2 yrs ago, not very heavy either, just "persistent" and if it wasn't for a bum drive that I threw the whole kitchen sink to solve, and it was only after using WD's utility it is now working perfect.

I confess to having READ about problem with Maxtor shipping some DiamondMax 10s years ago and they had to be rectified in Windows, but for Mac users, all they could offer was to exchange the drive. Seagate would offer firmware updates to their top of the line Cheetah SCSI drives, again, Windows only, and I was a Cheetah customer, but no access to a PC.

And from frequenting StorageReview and MacGurus. I developed one rule, learn 3 new things if possible each day about technology.

Black are Enterprise, Blue is consumer and then there is "RE" RAID Enabled.
If you want Caviar Black, and OWC doesn't, Amazon does for $80. OWC raised the price some on the 6400AAKS to $78.
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-640GB-Caviar-WD6401AALS/dp/B001GQYYSQ/

One reason I use Windows has been a couple programs that their OS X counterpart isn't as well designed; I like to experiment; Apple didn't offer a good selection of graphic cards; was important that I could sit down and use any computer OS and feel at home. I am only treading water and could be in over my head if I go off the deep end of the pool.

SuperDuper has a low learning curve, almost, it is about as plug and play as it gets as long as you don't get clever!

The G4 MDD amnesia cure I see.

Mac OS X boot environment and firmware:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-Intel_architecture

Amit Singh book and articles:

http://www.kernelthread.com/
http://www.osxbook.com/
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter4/firmware/

What is Firmware? (Apple)
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1061.html
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93772

Nina R Author

Level 1

28 points

Jan 31, 2009 11:05 PM in response to The hatter

The hatter wrote:

And from frequenting StorageReview and MacGurus. I developed one rule, learn 3 new things if possible each day about technology.

Good rule. Actually, 3 seems minimal nowadays (wipes sweat off brow).

Black are Enterprise, Blue is consumer and then there is "RE" RAID Enabled.
If you want Caviar Black, and OWC doesn't, Amazon does for $80. OWC raised the price some on the 6400AAKS to $78.
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-640GB-Caviar-WD6401AALS/dp/B001GQYYSQ/

Hmmmmmm... tempting.

was important that I could sit down and use any computer OS and feel at home.

Totally agree. For about the first 25 years of my working life (ouch) I was biplatform. 🙂 Windows at the office, Mac at home. I really liked being relatively "fluent" in both. I persuaded our IT guy to let our group make the switch because my horrible outdated Windows box (I think I was still using Win98 and some ancient version of MS Word in 2005) was making me want to fall on a sharp pencil. That was a gift from God, but it does mean I've lost touch with Windows, which is unfortunate. OTOH, I'd probably STILL be on Win98 if I hadn't shaken things up. 🙂 I couldn't resist the Windows crack in my previous post, because my good friend the engineer who's been helping me with computer (mostly Internet) issues for years is a Windows die-hard, and he seems to just expect to wipe his drives annually, more or less.

SuperDuper has a low learning curve, almost, it is about as plug and play as it gets as long as you don't get clever!

I have that on my hard drive, I'm pretty sure that's what I used to make the copy of the drive that I have from when I was still running Tiger.

Are you saying I should use Super Duper to copy my drive now prior to wiping it, and then replace files selectively? That I shouldn't just wipe it and restore it from a Time Machine backup? I was wondering if restoring from TM might defeat the purpose of wiping the drive by restoring corrupted files, although creating a new, clean directory structure seems to be the main objective here?

Thanks for all the links to articles. I'm sure they will help me get a better grip on what's going on with my G5.

Uh-oh... Boot failure, out of the blue