Intel G5 Mac Pro Tower stuck at startup

B

BeechyBoy

Registered
If your a Mac expert (even if your not) please take yourselves back to that gut wrenching feeling you got when your Mac first went wrong and you didn't know why - that is currently how I am feeling right now

I have an Intel G5 Mac Pro Tower, and it gets stuck on the blue screen everytime I startup. The mouse loads, then dissapears and re-appears in a cycle. I had been using it this very day and can't think I did anything to cause it?! What is the problem and does it sound serious?

Courses of action so far:
Unplugged all external cables and devices before restart.
Booted into Safe mode and got no further than logging in before it would then cycle back to login window again.
Booted onto system CD and ran some Disk Utility repair tools
...Still nothing

Potemtial courses of action I have so far:
There is a lot of dust in the machine, so grab the Hoover.
ReInstall the System from OSX disk ( is this a good idea or is there a way I can backup before I do this?)
Get DiskWarrior and let it have a go?

Ideas and solutions are really really appreciated before my only course of action left becomes to begin to rock back and forth in despair. Many thanks in advance,
Ash
 
Hi Beechy

A few things

1: There is no Intel G5 Mac Pro - there is either a G5 OR an Intel MacPro, if you can work out which one you have that would be good. Mac Pro's were introduced in August 2006, before that it was G5 machines

2: Dust is bad but hoovers are worse! They can generate static that can fry bits of your machine, never use a hoover in your case, certainly not a normal household one anyway. To clean out dust use a can of compressed air (many brands available from electronics stores) in very short bursts, with the can always held the right way up. Also when doing this make sure to hold the fan blades before spraying them, if the compressed air spins the fan it can induce current in the fan circuits that could potentially be damaging.

3: On your problem. If it boots from the CD that is good news, means its not entirely busted, and makes it sound like a bum HD perhaps. Anyway, you can try Resetting the PRAM first, see if that helps. After that I might start thinking about a reinstall/new hard drive, but before you do, if you have another mac around, connect the two with a firewire cable, (with the other mac on and your faulty mac off) then start up the g5/MacPro while holding the T key on the keyboard. If all goes well then the g5/MacPro's hard drive should appear as an external hard disk on the other machine, allowing you to back up data.
 
First, thanks for a swift reply - I have a Intel MacPro.
Hah, yeah a hoover could be a bad idea... especially with a metal nozzle (static city!). Compressed air sounds good, I'll see if I can get some locally.
Sounds like you think an archive and reinstall is the way forward here. Is that right?
Cheers for the really useful advice,
Ash
 
Archive and install might be good but try the firewire trick first if you can, as it sounds like it might be a bad hard drive, in which case a reinstall won't work, and either way doing a backup before anything else is a good move.


Did you try the pram reset? Can sometimes help as I said.

Cheers

ora
 
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