G4 not booting

lesparapluies wrote:

Hello, any help with this appreciated: I have an old Mac G4 tower (I don’t know the exact spec as it won’t boot, but it’s a dual-boot “mirror-door” model) - it sits in a corner of my studio and gets used a couple of times a year to access a couple of legacy programs which will only run in OS9. It has 2 hard drives (possibly 3) and has OS9 and OSX (I think it’s 10.5) installed. It refuses to boot (stuck on grey Apple screen, not the flashing question mark). The non-booting coincided with an obstinate disk getting stuck in the optical drive; all the usual methods failed and I think I probably damaged the drive using the paper-clip method to get it out - it made a lot of protesting noise). I have removed the optical drive altogether and don’t really need to replace it (does the G4 need to see an optical drive to boot properly?). I have tried it in target mode, with a Firewire cable connected to my present iMac, and also to a MacBook Pro, but the drives don’t show. Strangely enough, although they don’t show, when the Firewire cable is removed, a message flashes up “160GB Hitachi not ejected properly”. I have ordered a new 3.6V battery, as the one installed was absolutely dead, no voltage whatsoever, but reading up on this the general opinion is that this doesn’t actually achieve much. Could anyone advise on further diagnostic procedures please.

A new battery should help, but sounds like you may have something else going on with one of the hard drives. Can you boot while holding the option key to see the available bootable drives?

When I had a G4, the optical drive and the original OS media that came with the machine was my one fail-safe method of booting when all else failed. That was my control-group boot method. If I could not boot that, then I knew I had some other hardware issue, like the battery, or maybe even the power supply itself.

Do you have the Finder preferences set to show the hard drives on the desktop of the other Macs when you mounted it via FW target mode? It might have mounted, but you need to browse the Finder window to see it, if not shown on the Desktop. Check your Finder prefs.