g5 loses one core

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Level 1

40 points

g5 loses one core

I have had a whale of a time trying to work out what was up with my dual core 1.8 g5.

Have done just about everything imaginable from AHD, memtest, ASD 2.5.8. Disk utility,Diskwarrior. Reseated everything, changed bios battery, pram etc. etc.

The symptoms were and still are either, but not always

-hang soon after starting

-Kernel panic of a few varieties

-not boot into any boot volume (circle with a line through it) (ps. is there a name for that symbol so that it would be easier to search for)

All of these also led to max fans and a hard shut down.

I have done a clean install, no joy

removed the hard drive and used it to boot a macbookpro with no problem

The only test that showed any semblance of a negative result was the thermal calibration test on the ASD disc which failed both cpus. No other hardware test failed them.

And tonight may g5 seems to have taken some sort of self-healing action and shut down one of the processors. I now have a single core 1.8 g5! and so far it seems to work okay.

All which leads to my questions. Now that I am down to one cpu will that remain like that? Are the cpus replaceable? if so for how much? and how difficult? This last one will also answer is it possible to reseat the cpus?

Thanks in advance

Pat

g5 2*1.8, Mac OS X (10.5.8), mbp 2.4 10.6.3

Posted on May 4, 2011 3:09 PM

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Answer 1

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old comm guy

Level 4

2,249 points

May 4, 2011 4:25 PM in response to westerneyes

Sounds like you have a dual-processor 1.8, M9454LL/A from late 2004. It's not a dual-core machine, as you have individual processor modules, from what I can recall. You might look at this DV Warehouse listing for further information on a possible processor module.

A little concern remains about why Thermal Calibration failed, though. Do you recall what error codes were reported?

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Answer 2

westerneyes Author

Level 1

40 points

May 5, 2011 2:54 AM in response to old comm guy

Thank you or your reply, old comm guy. Indeed it is the model that you refer to, I was just being mentally lazy and confused it with my laptop. Thank you for the link, at least i know that it is possible. For the sake of completeness I found this link for removing the processor unit

http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-repair-power-mac-g5-remove-g5-processor-285803 /

although from my perspective it seems to have started in the middle.

The thermal calibration results didn't report any code as far as i can remember, just that they failed and need replacement. At the moment I seem to have a happy single processer 1.8 that will be capable of doing the jobs I will give it and am reluctant to even put it in sleep mode not to mind restart it!

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