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PPC mac mini & single long beep before boot chime

In process of migrating from a 2005 PPC mac mini 1.1 with a disk error and sometimes at reboot, a very LOUD tone, not beep, results about 5 seconds before the boot chime. It only successfully boots via Safe Boot, into OS X 10.5.8.

This mac shipped with Panther, now running Leopard. It has failed Verify Disk - Repair Disk for quite some time.


Why the LOUD single tone (not beep) at boot up?

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.5.8), 2005 PPC 1.42

Posted on Jul 20, 2015 9:41 PM

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5 replies

Jul 21, 2015 1:33 AM in response to MacHesney

  • 1 tone, repeating every 5 seconds: This indicates no RAM is installed.
  • 3 successive tones, a 5 second pause (repeating): This indicates RAM does not pass a data integrity check.
  • 1 long tone while holding down the power button: Indicates an EFI ROM update is in progress on a computer manufactured before 2012.
  • 3 long tones, 3 short tones, 3 long tones: Indicates EFI ROM corruption is detected and the computer is in EFI ROM recovery mode.

Above from:

Mac computers: About startup tones - Apple Support

Jul 21, 2015 5:22 PM in response to MacHesney

When you boot from the Tiger DVD and repair the startup drive, are a lot of repairs made?

What is listed by the line that says S.M.A.R.T. status or similar. I do not remember if it is worded differently in Tiger. TI had Tiger many many years ago.

It could be that the startup drive is dying.

Do y have a FireWire external drive yo can install Tiger on and test? The PPCs can only boot from FW, not USB like Intel Macs.

Jul 22, 2015 9:11 AM in response to lllaass

SMART is passed no problem, via Disk Utility or Onyx.
Repair Permissions could use some explanation, for instance why would a new installation of Snow Leopard have permissions needing repair?

Another forum post states the disk error was cured via Erase and Reinstall.
First reinstall OS X 10.4 which will allow the Tiger DVD (with AHT) to boot up after the Leopard upgrade.


Do y have a FireWire external drive yo can install Tiger on and test?

The Combo Drive will run Apple Hardware Test and the Installer utilities.
SMART passed,
Disk tests: ________
Just 1GB RAM leads to a long test cycle so I skipped the full test.


Since rebooting this mac into OS X 10.5.8 is a nightmare - no more reboots except to Installer DVD to Erase and Install.

May as well replace the 40GB 4,200 rpm ATA drive if do that.

PPC mac mini & single long beep before boot chime

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