Need hardware trouble shooting help

twray738

Registered
I have a G4 733 Gigabit Graphite tower. It was running fine then I Got iLife. It is not the problem. The DVD ROM quit reading DVDs so I ripped the Combo Drive out of an emac that died on me and put it in the the tower. While I was in the emac I saw the RAM and took it to put in the G4 Tower. It booted right up. The system profiler said the RAM was OK and the Drive was recognized. A bit later I kind stumbled with the mighty mouse. I kind quadruple clicked and hit the scroll wheel all at the same time. Kernel Panic. I restarted and ran the " fsck -y" routine in the command line. It found an error and said it fixed it then ran again and said everything was OK. So I typed reboot and nothing happened. SO I turned off the power, put in a Tiger disk then rebooted from the disk. I ran disk utility again and the pemissions repair. Made a place to copy my system to a larger partition so I could install iLife. Then after I rebooted everything went wrong. It booted fine but when i opened Safari to get a copy of carbon copy cloner the system froze. So I powered down the tower. opened it up and took the RAM that I just put in closed the case and wha-la it chimed but there was nothing . No signal to the monitor. no clicky sounds that indicate the computer is working. This is where I am now. What can I do now to trouble shoot this problem.
 
You do understand, that no one actually knows the condition of your PowerMac G4.

Assuming, that the Mac has not been damaged due to static discharge, improperly installed components, etc. - I would suggest you press the 'CUDA' (reset) button.
The CUDA button is a very small button, typically - in the vicinity of the clock battery.

My procedure of pressing the CUDA button varies from that of Apple. I have turned ON Macs, pressed the CUDA button, then restarted (via the external reset button) the Macs. And thus, you assume all liabilities by performing any of the above or equivalent actions.
 
Hello Thomas - your Mac may be suffering from not just one problem - but a host of them.

However - based the comment; "...Made a place to copy my system to a larger partition so I could install iLife..." I could assume that the iLife installer originally quit because there wasn't enough space on the partition that you were installing it too. (And remember, this was where all your trouble began.) Be aware that Mac OS X requires a small/reasonable amount of free space in order to function. Could the fact that Safari froze (and all your other problems beforehand) indicate that there in no room on your current startup disk???

I would reset the PMU by pressing the CUDA button (as "barhar" suggested) and force booting from the Tiger disk by holding down the "C" key. If it didn't boot I would start pulling connections such as the DVD drive, and memory sticks, etc, until I could get it to boot. Once there, I would desperately try to make space available on the existing boot volume or maybe consider doing a fresh install on that new partition...
 
Actually I noticed that I didn't have enough space before I tried to install iLife. I only had about 2.5 gigs left. I looked into the PMU thing (Thanks for the link by the way) but i was unclear as to when to push the button. Do you Push the button after powering up then use the reset on the front of the tower to reboot? Or do you push the button while the power is off?

I took the tower to the Apple store this morning and they did it and I forgot to make the mental note as to if it was powered up or not.

We did an archive and install. The difference was that they hooked the monitor to the ADC and I use the VGA. I got the comupter home and it did it again. Chimed but no further. Could it really be the VGA port that is causing the problem with the PMU? Another bit of info is that I got the Optical drive out of an emac that died a similar but diferent death ( the motherboard died) I had to have it's PMU reset once several monthes before it died. Could it really be a problem. It is my only DVD drive. I will have a problem installing iLife without it.
 
As per the Apple link - Apple states to push the CUDA button with no power applied (by removing the AC power cord from the Macintosh).

I have turned ON Macs, pressed the CUDA button, and then pressed the reset button - contrary to Apple's procedure; thus, the reason for the liability statement.
 
Ok Guys, thanks. I am up and running for the moment anyway. I Cloned my boot partition to a larger partition. Only at the end of the cloning I got an error message that says that there was an error coping the "usr" directory. Is there an easy fix for this.

Thanks again
 
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