On reboot - gray screen & kernel panics

S

slaz55

Registered
Running a 1.8 G5, 1gb ram and system 10.4.5. About a month ago I replaced my DVD drive with a Pioneer A10 superdrive which wasn't supported by 10.4 and patched it to work with iTunes, up to this point everything had been fine. Since then I cannot get a clean boot. I did remove the DVD drive but this had no affect so I reinstalled the drive and moved on. At first I could boot into the safe mode but that only worked a couple of times before I would get the gray Apple screen, kernel panic and the fans would kick into high. I then went out and bought a new drive took out the troubled system drive and clean installed 10.4 on the new drive which promptly booted into new install screen, I was prompted to update to 10.4.6 which I did and did get a clean boot. Now I reinstalled the old drive to recover my data and guess what...a kernel panic even though this should not have been the start up drive I then disconnected it and just used the new drive but couldn't get by the grey screen and system hang. To make a long story short this computer will run fine on a clean install and run for days until I need to reboot then its the kernel panic again. I've run Applejack which works for 1 boot and then its back to the unbootable G5. Could this be a something that will be cleared up by backing up and cleaning all the drives with a clean install or could this be a hardware thing.
BTW the system hang is something about the Darwin kernel dated March 26, 2006. Any help would be GREATLY APPRECIATED!
 
My guess is that this was precipitated by having the Mac without mains power and left to cool down for some time while you swapped over DVD drives. I would recommend fitting a new memory battery. Probably won't help but only costs a few dollars. Leaving a computer to cool down can also show up a pre-existing fault in the power supply unit caused by dud capacitors.

Or you may have disturbed something. Make sure that all connectors are seated firmly, including RAM.

When I added a new drive to my G4 tower I damaged a ribbon connector. In my case it was obvious but if it had been just slightly stretched, leaving an intermittent connection, I could easily have ended up with your problem. I would certainly think about inspecting/replacing the Hard Drive and DVD connectors.

I may be way off base but maybe my thoughts will help you track down the real culprit. Best of luck! :)
 
I did check the ribbon and thought I might have damaged it on the reinstallation but that wasn't it. I ended up going through the whole box taking out everything connected such as drives and any new ram. After pulling everything out but the original drive and ram I started getting clean and fast boots. While I was getting clean boots I installed all my OSX updates thinking it may be a driver. I just started replacing everything one at a time and rebooting. After everything was replaced my mac was still booting clean so I'm really not sure if it was hardware or software related. I do know that by updating the software and reseating everything worked wonders.
 
Excellent, I hope that proves to be a permanent fix!
I used to be a Reliability Test Engineer many years ago. At that time we got some component test results from the British Army. They showed that, statistically, the LEAST reliable component was the connector - any type of connector.
 
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