G4 wont boot - Need advice

[cory1848]

Thanks for reading the post.

I have a G4 Dual 867 MMD machine that has been flawless up til now. It is locking up on start up. I get the gray screen, apple icon and then the processing wheel spinning for about 2 minutes, then it just stops. Nothing has been installed that would cause this. Running Leopard 5.6, 2 gigs ram, 250 gig drive. Disconnected any extras and ran the hardware test which came back clean.
I can only boot it in target mode, I wont get to safe mode or anything else. Now I know this is an old machine, however I was hoping to possible use it as a time machine back up, just load it with drives and have it sit.
I can access the disk via my mini using target mode and I can boot from the drive via the mini, no data loss so I think that rules out the drive itself. Since hardware checked all passed, I am thinking software, but if thats the case, why would it boot to the mini?
I am at a loss here on what to do.

I need the drive contents so I was planning on just cloning the drive over to the mini (after mini drive upgrade), and there wouldnt be any downtime. I am not sure how I can do that now since I cannot boot from the G4 to make the clone.

Any tips on getting this back up? Already ran FSCK a couple of times and came back ok.

Thanks

 

[cory1848]

bump

 

[djackmac]

Why not try putting the mini in target disk mode and boot the Tower from the minis drive to see if it will boot a system at all? Then at least you know you may be looking at hardware such as bad RAM or a logic board/processor issue. Just because the Hardware test didn't flag any failures just means that there isn't something obviously failing. I deal with hardware failures all the time that diags never catch.

 

[cory1848]

I tried that before but was unable to tell the tower to select the mini as a boot device. It would freeze before it got to that point. Will try again when I get home.

Will also start yanking the ram out stick by stick as well...see if that gets me anywhere..

 

[djackmac]

Go to Boot manager by booting up while holding the option key. Then you can choose to boot from the minis HD. Make sure the mini is connected through firewire and in target disk mode.