Half-dead G4

[Eirik Øverby]

On Dec 30, 2007, at 4:41 PM, Justin Hibbits wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> Maybe someone could help me with this problem:  I recently purchased  
> a 1.25GHz
> PowerMac G4 on eBay, and it worked perfectly fine.  However, after  
> loading
> FreeBSD on it, and running it for a couple weeks, it no longer boots.
> HOWEVER, I can still hold down the mouse button and the CD ejects,  
> so I'm
> assuming it must be reaching some part of OpenFirmware, it just  
> doesn't POST
> (I don't hear the chime).  I've tried ripping out a couple RAM sticks,
> reseating the video card, resetting the PMU, and one time I did  
> manage to get
> the chime, without the video card in there, but even pulling the  
> card out
> again I still don't get the chime now.  Is there any other test I  
> can perform
> to narrow down the cause, and fix this problem?

Torfinns answer is not too shabby; I'd give that a go. I had this  
problem on an iMac at one point, and it turned out I had a bad SATA  
cable. I'm not kidding - the 8cm SATA cable from mobo to drive in the  
iMac was somehow partly broken, resulting in erratic and varying  
behavior depending on whether the 'puter was standing (and at which  
angle) or laying down.

/Eirik


>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Justin