Need Help!!! G4 won't start.

dlookus

dlookus

Disgruntled user
Hello everyone. My good friend just bought a 933 MHz G4. It was working for about 48 hours, but all of a sudden when he pushes the power button, the light comes on, but then it fades out immediatley. The machine had RAM installed by the place he bought it from, so I had him remove that and try again, but no luck. I don't know if it's a bad power supply or what, but if anyone has an idea of what might be causing this, please let me know.

Also one other wacky thing that happened to him was he installed Print Drivers last night, adn when he restarted it couldn't find either system (OS9 or OSX.) Maybe these problems are related?

Thanks in advance.:(
 
Heya dlookus.
What you're describing sounds like a hardware failure being detected and forcing the machine to power down. Try removing everything externally connected to the machine including keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Try a power up. If the machines looks like it went through the hardware initialization stage (or the power LED stays on and doesn't go off), then you know one of those periphs are the culprit. Trying each periph one by one using the same process should narrow down the offending beast. If you never get past the first power up without any devices, then it's something on the motherboard (or internally connected periph) or as you've said, the power supply. Being only 2 days old, this should be promptly returned to the dealer where it was purchased for an exchange.

Important note: No doubt all this powering up and down forcibly will wreck havoc on the boot drive. So bring a disk utility program with you (like DiskWarrior) and make sure your friend has an OS install CD as well. You could be formatting and installing from scratch if it's particularly bad.

Wish you luck bud.
 
Thanks Klink.
That was pretty much along the lines of what I was thinking.
He's got it back up and working now.
You were right. It was the motherboard, but it just needed to be reset. Thank goodness.:)
Seems to be working OK now.
Thanks again.
 
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