theblokedownstairs
Level 1 (0 points)

Q: iMac 17" PPC late 2003 model, freezing.

Hi all,

 

I have a late 2003 iMac. It keeps freezing after short use. I wiped the hard drive and installed leopard. it had leopard on it before but it was running slowly because of all the junk my mother had put onto it. Specs below:

 

PowerMac 6,3

PowerPC G4 (3.3)

1.25GHz

512MB RAM

bus speed 167MHz

 

OS X 10.5.8 Leopard

 

I couldn't do a disk verify as it froze as soon as I ran disk utility.

 

I ran before i installed leopard and it showed that the disk and permissions were fine.

 

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Aug 16, 2012 4:22 AM

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theblokedownstairs

Q: iMac 17" PPC late 2003 model, freezing.

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  • Helpful answers

  • by andbeonetraveler,

    andbeonetraveler andbeonetraveler Aug 16, 2012 8:14 AM in response to theblokedownstairs
    Level 1 (34 points)
    Notebooks
    Aug 16, 2012 8:14 AM in response to theblokedownstairs

    Can you currently boot from the leopard install disc now? Does it freeze when you do that? And from the install disc, can you run disk utility (it's one of the utilities included on the disc itself)?

     

    Can you boot from and Apple Hardware Test disc? (Usually you insert the disc, startup and hold down D, for some of them you hold down C, depending on what it says on the disc.)

  • by theblokedownstairs,

    theblokedownstairs theblokedownstairs Aug 16, 2012 11:13 AM in response to andbeonetraveler
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Aug 16, 2012 11:13 AM in response to andbeonetraveler

    It does boot from the disk but it freezes up in the middle of anything. I wasn't able to get to the hardware test. Hold D was it. It says nothing on the disc.

  • by andbeonetraveler,

    andbeonetraveler andbeonetraveler Aug 16, 2012 4:25 PM in response to theblokedownstairs
    Level 1 (34 points)
    Notebooks
    Aug 16, 2012 4:25 PM in response to theblokedownstairs

    Have you disconnected everything extraneous, except the keyboard and mouse?

     

    What happened when you tried to boot from the hardware test disc?

     

    Is there any improvement when if you boot in safe mode? (Hold down shift key at startup)

     

     

    If not, my next moves would be the following, but, *disclaimer* you should not follow this advice blindly unless you really know what you're doing, because I am not that experienced. Hopefully someone else will comment soon.

     

    If you have an airport card installed, I would remove it. I have no idea whether a bad airport card can cause this kind of problem, but it can't hurt to remove it.

     

    I would probably try starting up in single user mode. If it doesn't freeze, you can run fsck (sort of a command-line proxy for Disk Utility, as I understand it) from there. Read this article first.

     

    Next I would try to find out whether bad RAM is the problem. I assume you have two RAM sticks, both 256? If so, I would remove one (not both!) of the RAM sticks and then start up in safe mode. For example, you could start by removing the RAM in the user-accessible slot, since that's easiest to do. Instructions are here.