Q: G5 pings three times, fans rev up and won't boot.
Yesterday, while running an audio application on my G5, all of a sudden the screen started blackening from the top down in horizontal sectors. A new screen came up w/ a message about "Invalid access to memory..." and welcoming me to Open Firmware. Gave me a choice to continue booting or shut down. I shut down, did a safe boot and everything tested fine (ran Disk Utility and DiskWarrior). Restarted and trashed the preferences file for the audio app, generated a new one and the program ran perfectly. I had one freeze on the G5 later in the day.
This morning, on first booting, the desktop appeared and instantly a thin black horizontal bar containing white repeated characters popped up near the top right of the screen followed by the same thing near top left. G5 froze and I had to power down. Now when I try to boot up, the G5 pings three times within about 10" of pressing the power button, the fans rev up really high and I have to manually power down. Tried unplugging all peripherals, unplugging the G5 and resetting the SMU button, but no change. Any ideas, anyone?
G5 PowerMac 2.3 GHz dual processor
Tiger (OS X 10.4.11)
Two internal 750 GB drives
One external 2 TB backup
Posted on Jun 20, 2014 8:14 AM