Help Please! - G4 won't boot (after a KP)

N

npj

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Hi all,

I've just had a Kernel Panic on my G4 (1.42ghz, need more info?-let me know), pressed the power buttom to turn it off and now it won't go past the grey screen with the apple in the middle! I've tried holding down the power button again and restarting and also holding shift for a safe boot but it always stops/freezes on the grey apple screen. What can I do?

Note: I've had 3 kernel panics over the last week (quite unusual) and I've done a 'safe boot' and repaired permissions everytime.

I also have the Diskwarrior cd I could boot from but I can't get the CD drive open! Can I force open it somehow?

I'm very, very concerned for my precious little G4 so any help would be great!

Thanks in advance,

npj :(
 
Hi.

You can open the cd player in the firmware command screen (hold down command option o and f on startup)
After the firmware prompt type "eject cd" and press return.

This will eject the CD.

Disk warrior is a good idea as it has saved my bacon a few times but you could also go into single user mode and run fsck -y or -f to repair the file system.
You may have to run this command a couple of times.

Hope that helps...
 
npj said:
I'm very, very concerned for my precious little G4 so any help would be great!(
Click to expand...

I doubt it will work, but you could try using firewire target-disk mode, assuming you have a firewire port, to save your files and to run DiskWarrior, reinstall, etc. Sometimes individuals have been able to start up in this mode under dire circumstances.
 
I began having Kernal Panic attacks three months ago and ended up in exactly your situation. DiskWarrior did not help. It turned out to be faulty memory. Once the memory cards were replaced (at very little cost) the problem was sorted.

However, the cause of your problem may not be the same. DiskWarrior may be worth trying. Have you tried holding down the mouse button when you reboot? Usually this will cause the CD drawer to open.
 
Hey all

I've tried running Diskwarrior and have rebuilt every volume on my two internal hard disks. When I looked at the report it made for my startup volume there were a lot (10 or so) things that were fixed in red. So yeah I replaced every volume and restarted a couple of times and still won't go past the grey screen.

I also ran 'fsck' in single user mode. At first it said the disk could not be repaired. After running DW it went through the process usual with no repairs made.

rhisiart - I've had the same 2g (4x512) of RAM in it since I purchased it new. Although, it was reshuffled about 3 months ago (haha funny that...) because I was going to add more (replace 2x512 chips with 1g ones) but only realised after putting a total of 3g in that it can only 'see' a total of 2g. So I went back to what I think was the original arrangement of RAM (4x512 chips). So... could changing the arrangement of the RAM be worthwhile? or taking some out?

The Ghost - Thanks for the firewire target disk mode option. Didn't know about that. I'll try some more things first before I go there.

*Also, can I boot up from a Mac OS X install cd and run disk utility? I've got install disks for Panther but none of them have the 'hold down c key to boot' writing on them? I've got the original 10.2 disks too. Any of these useful?

Thanks everybody.
 
Ran disk utility on all volumes. It fixed a lot on the startup volume but still - not booting :(
I ran it 3 times on the startup volume too. The second and third time it repaired nothing.
 
running the apple hardware tester at the moment. I've reset the pram aswell. And I'm thinking I may end up having to reinstall panther. If I reinstall panther and do an 'archive and install' what will it erase?
 
Remove extra RAM. Leave only minimum or original, so mayebe 2x512.
If you have another Mac, and can use the target mode, see if you can find a file called "panic.log" (without the ""), if so, copy that here as a zip file or text file - that file should have some hints on why the KPs occur.
 
Hi Giaguara,

I've found two files in my library/logs/crashreporter they are called:

???.crash.log

and...

loginwindow.crash.log

could these be handy for us?

Thanks for this!
 
That is just loginwindow's crash log .. kernel panic should save it in the format "panic.log" and I think it's in a different location - can't check where right now since I haven't had a KP on any partition of this mac. The panic.log has different data though, so loginwindow crash doesn't do it.
- so; test removing all extra hardware (incl. those ram), and software you might have added jsut before the problems started to occur.
 
I searched my HD for panic.log and nothing was found. Does this mean anything?

I'll try taking 2x512 chips of RAM out at a time and see what happens.

I'll check my apps too. Could the file that's messing things up be any type of file?

Thanks again!!
 
Could the panic.log file you've got me looking for be called something different? I've been running 10.3.8 btw.
 
Someone suggested to run Carbon Copy Cloner and make a copy of my main partition on to another partition. Could this be worthwhile? Could ccc just copy the problem?
 
Well people, I have to have my mac ready for work tomorrow so I'm gonna give in a do an 'archive and install'. Can anyone confirm that an 'archive and install' won't delete anything but will move everything that was on the partition to a 'previous system folder' ??

Thanks.
 
Read This

The Archive and Install installation option is used to replace the System-level components of Mac OS X while offering an additional option to preserve both your Users folder and network settings.
 
It shouldn't delete anything as such. However you may have to reinstall some programmes (e.g. Intego products seem to need reinstalling after archive and install).

It may be significant that your memory has been reorganised

Good luck.

Let us know what happens.
 
npj said:
The Ghost - Thanks for the firewire target disk mode option. Didn't know about that. I'll try some more things first before I go there.
Click to expand...

You are welcome. One way or another, if you have not done so, try to get your files backed up before something worse happens.
 
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