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Safe Boot and Startup Problems

Hello,


My PowerMac G5 has been having serious startup problems for months. It can take hours of trying to finally get it to boot up. It can freeze at various points throughout the boot up. Sometimes the screen is filled with a load of text which sometimes ends with the line, "we are hanging here..." Other times it freezes and displays the message that the computer needs to be restarted in various languages against a black screen. Sometimes it hangs with all the fans on full blast!


I've tried all the usual things like resetting PRAM, the power management switch, checking the drive in disk utilities etc... I've checked the RAM with Rember and re-seated them. Everything seems to pass and be okay.


Yesterday I read about booting in safe mode so I tried that last night and it started it first time, although it took ages!!


Does this provide any clues? I mean, can this rule out any hardware issues?


The model I have is:

PowerMac G5 with a PowerPC 2GHz processor from late 2005. Model: PowerMac7,3


If anyone has any ideas or could give any advice I would be very grateful.


Kind Regards

David

Posted on May 19, 2015 1:26 AM

Reply
2 replies

May 19, 2015 10:07 AM in response to mandarcy

Hi David,


It does NOT rule out HW problems, here's my notes on that...


One way to test is to Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, Test for problem in Safe Mode...


PS. Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive & trash/rebuild cache files


Reboot, test again.


If it only does it in Regular Boot, then it could be some hardware problem like Video card, (Quartz is turned off in Safe Mode), or Airport, or some USB or Firewire device, or 3rd party add-on, Check System Preferences>Accounts (Users & Groups in later OSX versions)>Login Items window to see if it or something relevant is listed. Or an errant process eating up RAM.


Check the System Preferences>Other Row, for 3rd party Pref Panes.


Also look in these if they exist, some are invisible...


/private/var/run/StartupItems


/Library/StartupItems


/System/Library/StartupItems


/System/Library/LaunchDaemons


/Library/LaunchDaemons


Also...


Have you blown the dust out lately?


Get Temperature Monitor to see if it's heat related...


http://www.bresink.com/osx/TemperatureMonitor.html

May 20, 2015 12:47 AM in response to BDAqua

Hi BD Aqua,


Thanks very much for the advice. I was set to do some more testing last night using your advice but this time it wouldn't boot at all!

When trying to boot in safe mode it would just shut down every time before it got to the grey screen with the radian. 😟

It got too late last night so tonight I need to try and see if it will start from the install disk.


Kind Regards

David

Safe Boot and Startup Problems

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