new old mac..

D

djbeta

Registered
Hi,

I just bought a g4 500 desktop machine off of ebay..

I was able to install OS X 10.4 on it quite easily.. but after I installed it,
i wasn't able to boot up from the hard drive.

i'm a newbie at technical troubleshooting.. so any advice would be appreciated.. my PC tech friend thinks that it's the motherboard/IDE controller.. but I'm a bit confused because we seemed quite able to install to the Hard Drive (in fact, we installed to 2 different hard drives).. we also moved the memory around and tried different memory combinations

any ideas... ????

p.s. we did reset the PMU and checked the battery
 
What you may have to do is get a Firmware update to be able to run 10.4 on your Mac. But because you did not post as to what G4 Mac you have, I would not be able to help you find the right firmware for you computer.
 
'g4 500 desktop' - translates to 'PowerMac G4 500 MHz (possibly single microprocessor)'. If so, then (as per 'MacTracker') djbeta has a 'PowerMac G4 (AGP Graphics) model, if a single microprocessor; or, a 'PowerMac G4 (Gigabit Ethernet)' model, if with dual microprocessors.

djbeta - select the 'Apple, About This Mac' menu item. When the 'About This Mac' window appears, click on the 'More Info...' button. This will open (launch, run) an application titled 'System Profiler', displaying a window.
With 'Hardware' selected under the 'Contents' column and 'Hardware Overview:' displayed in the right hand column - look for 'Boot ROM Verision:'. If less than '4.2.8...' (where '...' may be 'f1', etc.) - a 4.2.8 Firmware update may be required.
 
And if you have to install the Firmware, you'll have to install OS 9 to do the install.
 
And you probably need to be all the way up-to-date with 9 to 9.2.2 before the firmware update would be offered to you through OS 9's Software Update control panel.
 
I'll find out exactly which machine it is later today. Thanks for letting me know about the firmware issue. OS 9 ? oh no.. really.. :-/

Does it make sense that the computer can boot fine from the Tiger CD without the firmware update ?
 
yeah it does. I mean you can does because my Dual 450 Mhz G4 Power Mac. Had to have it's firmware updated to be able to boot off of a 10.4 hard drive. So when I put OS 9.2.2 back on and get the update did the update and then reset and when I held down the option key at boot it whould now after the firmware update able to boot into 10.4. I think it had to do with something in the bass core of the OS had something changed in a big way. So some of the mid G4 Power Macs had to have there firmware updated so the OS could work with them. As for being able to boot and run the installer yeah if should have told you 10.4 would not work on your computer. But sometimes that don't allway happen and so the install runs and get done then when it resets you boot disk to the main Hard Drive guess what the OS sees you bad firmware and will not boot.
 
I can't get an operating system on this computer... and when I boot from the OS install disk, I can't go to "About this Mac" .. how else can I figure out which computer I have ?

I tried to install Panther... I got errors twice on install, then it installed on the third try, but when I try to boot from the hard disk, I get a grey apple screen with a neverending spinning gear.

I tried replacing the ram , resetting the PMU

I tried booting from an firewire target mode-booted ibook with Panther on its drive but that didn't work
 
OS 9.1 had errors on install "Problems were encountered accessing the file "Apple System Profiler" on the disk "Untitled" (the hard drive!) Please move the file to another folder and then try again.

My friend is suggesting that this might be a problem with the hard drive bus... or maybe the ribbon cable.... any thoughts ? should I maybe try putting a pci sonnet card in the computer and see if it boots from a drive on that bus ?

anything else I should try ?
 
another question... would the computer work with a dead motherboard battery ?... i actually think this battery is OK.. (it registers /something/ on a battery checker) but I'm just curious..
 
you mac will boot even if you have a dead battery. The EZ way find out if the battery is good or not is to unplug it from the wall and let it set for 15 to 30 mins then plug it back in and see if the date and time is right. As for the hard drive sounds as if that drive you have has some bad spots on it. I would say try useing a "Know Working" hard drive in it. If you can install and boot then your other hardware is fine. If when you use "Know good drive" and it is haveing the same mass ups then look to a bad cable. Now as for the bus speed that will not do anything other then make get stuff on and off the drive slow. Because any (E)IDE hard drive had to be backwards compatble with the older IDE hardware spacs. Now S-ATA is hole other ball of BS. As long as it has a 40 pin IDE not a 40 pin SCSI cord then you should be ok. I use to run a 100 GB EIDE hard drive on my old G3 Bagie Mac just that the drive had to go slower then what it's max bus speed was thats all.
 
just wanted to share....

I plugged in a Sonnet ATA card.. used a new ribbon cable, and OS X 10.3 installed fine and worked perfectly...

do you guys think it could have been the ribbon cable ?? or.. the drive bus on the motherboard ??
 
If the cable has been heavily abused, it's possible that it's damaged. But I would put my money on either bad jumper settings / hard drive or bad logic board. On an PATA chain, you may not have more than two drives (duh). If you have only one drive, the drive needs to be jumpered as "Master" and placed on the end plug of the ribbon cable. If you have two drives, "Master" must be on the end and "Slave" in the middle.
 
I think the drive is set to cable select


it didn't work on the logic board .. but worked fine as soon as i put it on the sonnet card's bus
 
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