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PowerMac G5 won't start; Power on light blinks.

Hi, everyone.

My PowerMac G5 dual processor stopped working yesterday. It had been behaving unusually lately with frequent freezes that required it to be turned off and them restarted. I have removed both internal drives and them are both working fine. I also blew some of the dust inside built-up around the electronic boards and the internal fans. In addition I also pressed the reset button to see if it would solve the problem. It still won't start.

As I press the power on button to start the computer I notice that a few seconds later the power on light starts to blink. Not the type of blink that alternates between light on and light off. Instead the light will vary its intensity between low and high. It blinks three times than an short interval follows. Then it blinks three times again followed by an interval. And it continues following this pattern.

Any ideas of what it might be ?

Thank you in advance.

MacBook Pro i7 17", 8 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, Mac OS X (10.6.4), PowerMac G5 dual 2.0 GHz

Posted on Oct 20, 2010 11:57 PM

35 replies

BDAqua

Level 10

239,363 points

Jun 30, 2011 2:12 PM in response to woodsman124

It can show on any G5, and even many other computers & electronic devices of the period.

http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/pmg5.html

http://lowendmac.com/ppc/power-macintosh-g5.html

lusvin

Level 1

0 points

May 1, 2012 8:28 AM in response to apple_customer

hi guys, i did what you guys said, but now the light it blinks one time only any ideas?

Feb 1, 2014 11:44 AM in response to lusvin

It seems like this is a common problem due to solder joints getting old and losing contact, particularly around the RAM slots. Using a blow dryer and pushing in on the RAM would temporarily fix the issue for me, which was that while trying to power on, the computer light would come on and blink once, but would not chime or boot, and no video at all. Sometimes when it did boot, the fans would eventually rev super fast and the computer would freeze.

So, I took the computer apart and removed the logic board as suggested by Dean W. earlier in the thread. But rather than using a soldering iron, I used a heat gun around the back side of the RAM slots (solder side) and it appears to have worked (for a day now at least).

I did need to push the PMU (Cuda) button while the computer was powered off but plugged in to get anything at all to happen after reassembly.