Cunnla
Level 4 (2,011 points)
Desktops

Q: Safe boot only, no sound or airport

eMac 2005, 1.42 GHz, 1gb RAM, PowerMac 6,4 Power PC G4 HD 150gb.

The machine has been lying idle for a month or so, and when I turned it on a few days ago it booted to a blue screen, no "starting Mac OS" progress bar, and then it turned black and had to be powered down.

Boots into Safe mode only and won't boot from clone on Firewire drive or from internal startup disk. Will boot from original install disk so I used Disk Utility there to verify the startup disk -- no problems found -- and to repair Permissions.

What I've tried:

* replaced the 3.6V backup battery -- was down to less than 1V -- and reset the PMU.

* reset PRAM, and also NVRAM using the terminal commands after booting to Command Option o f. When it restarted it was the blue screen again.

* started in Single User mode and did fcsk -fy which found nothing wrong with the startup disk.

* also in Single User mode did the sh /etc/rc command for booting and staying in SU mode which showed a lot of info. What caught my eye in particular was "Boot Cache Control -- could not start cache  resource busy" and "Boot Cache: cache init failed." Also, further down was a whole bunch of mDNSResponder errors saying "ERROR  unknown opt 4"

In Safe mode, System Preferences/Sound say "No output devices found" and the Sound effects are all greyed out.

In System Prefs / Network there is no Airport, although Airport was working before on an Airport Extreme card.

Airport setup says "No Airport card installed" although it is installed and was working a few weeks ago.

In Audio Midi, it says output and input not supported, as well as "default output -- none" and the same for input. However, the startup chime sounds so the speakers must be OK.

   Does all this mean that the Video card is gone kaput? I don't know much about the tech side and how this knocks out the sound and the startup functions. Looking for enlightenment.

   I've had this eMac for 10 years or so and it was mostly used for Internet browsing and some audio and iMovie editing but nothing very heavy. Also for Appleworks 6 occasionally. Would hate to have to throw it away.

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), mid-2012 13inch, 4gb RAM, 250gb SSD

Posted on Sep 25, 2016 11:51 PM

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Cunnla

Q: Safe boot only, no sound or airport

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  • Helpful answers

  • by BDAqua,

    BDAqua BDAqua Sep 26, 2016 6:25 AM in response to Cunnla
    Level 10 (123,745 points)
    Sep 26, 2016 6:25 AM in response to Cunnla

    Airport is disabled in earlier versions of OSX while in Safe Mode.

     

    A few things to try...

     

    Remove RAM & clean contacts with an eraser, reseat the RAM.

     

    Does it boot into Open  Firmware with CMD+Option+o+f ?

     

    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42642

     

    reset-nvram (press Enter)

    set-defaults (press Enter)

    reset-all (press Enter)

     

    Have you done a PRAM reset, CMD+Option+p+r...

     

    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

     

    In fact, do 3 in a row, takes a bit of time.

     

    Boot holding alt or option key, let it sit on the boot choice screen for a few minutes to warm up before selecting boor disk.

  • by Cunnla,

    Cunnla Cunnla Sep 26, 2016 10:43 PM in response to BDAqua
    Level 4 (2,011 points)
    Desktops
    Sep 26, 2016 10:43 PM in response to BDAqua

    Hi,

    Thanks for responding.

    I've done the "3 in a row" as you suggested, but no joy. Right now it's the blue screen with movable cursor.

    Some more info that may be relevant.

    * Operating system is OS X 10.4.11

    * I have done the Apple Hardware Test from the install disk, and everything passed.

    * Erased the hard disk and reinstalled Tiger but it made no difference, except that now I have 2 backups on the

      Firewire disk but no way to get them onto the eMac.

    * Played a DV movie file on Quick Time player and could see the film, but no sound of course.

      Does that mean the video chip on the logic board is OK or doesn't it matter?

    * Once or twice in trying to get it going there has been a black and white pattern or rectangles on the bottom third

      of the screen. There was also -- at different times -- distortion where the startup Apple logo is in the center. Twice

      there was a multicolored square where the logo should be. These things have not happened in the last couple of

      days, it's a clear blue sky as far as the screen is concerned. The display is also very clear.

    * Can hear the startup chime, unless a headphone jack is plugged in.

    Regards.

  • by BDAqua,

    BDAqua BDAqua Sep 27, 2016 7:55 AM in response to Cunnla
    Level 10 (123,745 points)
    Sep 27, 2016 7:55 AM in response to Cunnla

    Sounds like the video chip is OK, but AHT isn't very good at testing HDD or RAM especially.

     

    Did you try the NVRAM reset?

     

    Long shot, but...

     

    Open Audio Midi Setup in Applications>Utilities, see the input & output options & KHz setting there, some things will change it for their own use, then not set it back.

  • by Cunnla,

    Cunnla Cunnla Sep 27, 2016 10:48 PM in response to BDAqua
    Level 4 (2,011 points)
    Desktops
    Sep 27, 2016 10:48 PM in response to BDAqua

    Did you try the NVRAM reset?

    Yes, a few times. After reset -all it reboots to the Apple logo with spinning wheel and then the blue screen.

    Incidentally, sometimes the blue screen has a movable cursor and later the cursor freezes. Another thing that happens sometimes is that after a while the screen goes black and will return to blue with a mouse click, as if the sleep function is working.

    All of these things happen randomly, not regularly. Here's a picture of something that happened this morning but has disappeared on a restart and not shown up since. It's not text but looks like a circuit pattern or color pattern.

    Just did another reset of the Power Management Unit but now it's just a frozen blue screen.

    emac.JPG

  • by BDAqua,

    BDAqua BDAqua Sep 28, 2016 3:25 AM in response to Cunnla
    Level 10 (123,745 points)
    Sep 28, 2016 3:25 AM in response to Cunnla

    Have you blown the dust out lately?

  • by Cunnla,

    Cunnla Cunnla Sep 28, 2016 4:36 AM in response to BDAqua
    Level 4 (2,011 points)
    Desktops
    Sep 28, 2016 4:36 AM in response to BDAqua

    Never, but will give it a go tomorrow.

    Regards.

  • by Cunnla,

    Cunnla Cunnla Sep 28, 2016 10:04 PM in response to BDAqua
    Level 4 (2,011 points)
    Desktops
    Sep 28, 2016 10:04 PM in response to BDAqua

    Opened it up and used a vacuum cleaner and hairdryer to clean it up as much as possible. There wasn't much dust inside. Booted up to the blue screen with the circuit-like patterns.

    While inside there, I noticed one capacitor with a slight brown stain on top, possibly a leak. That may be the cause of the trouble. Now looking for replacement capacitors or a used 1.42GHz logic board but no luck so far.