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G5 power light flashing 3 times. Now, nothing.

I came into work this morning to find my Power Mac G5 frozen on the the desktop with fans blasting. I have it set to start-up before I arrive at work. I re-started, it chimed and it made it to the white screen before freezing. I unplugged the power cord for a while then tried restarting again. Things spool up but then I the power light just flashes 3 times, pauses and then repeats. I checked the database and that is the code for incompatible memory. I unplugged all of perpherals and removed all of the memory, blasted everything with canned air and just for kicks tried powering up. This time the power indicator flashed once.


I pressed the SMU button, re-seated the memory and restarted. This time I got the chime and a steady power indicator but just a black screen. I know that it sometimes takes a while for things to get going again but after 10 minutes the screen is still black and the fans are ramped up to full. Persistent, I powered off and tried restarting again. Again the time but this time the white screen with the grey Apple logo came up. But that is where it stopped. At this point I figured I better see if I could get some further assistance from the good folks here.


The power light is no longer blinking 3 times, but I'm guessing I may have at least one memory card that died on me. Would you suggest removing two at a time and trying to power on again to see if that solves the problem? Any advice is appreciated, thanks.


~ Kort

24" 2.4 GHz iMac(10.5.8) MacMini(10.4.11) 2GHz G5(10.4.11) Airport Ext. (n), Mac OS X (10.5.8), 23" Cinema Display, Epson 836XL scanner, Epson R1800 Printer

Posted on Sep 26, 2012 7:41 AM

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20 replies

Oct 3, 2012 1:13 PM in response to Kort

I work for an electronics manufacturer and took my G5 down to the head engineer. We did some testing and found the exact spot on the MOBO where the issue is occuring. I'm not sure everyone's board is quite the same, but for me it is in-between the 2 banks of RAM and just to the center and slightly above of the ID strip there. When we heat the area it will start normally and run. If we hit that exact spot with a technician's freeze spray or even tap on it, then it locks up again. I'm going to research how to remove the MOBO so that we can take it out and examine the other side and possibly fix any cracked solder there.


Wish me luck!

G5 power light flashing 3 times. Now, nothing.

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