PowerMac G4 Repair Problems

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I'm trying to fix a powermac g4 running Mac OS 9.2. System freezes at start up. I disabled extensions (Shift at boot) and it runs fine. I'm stuck at this point not having much experience with them. I read the FAQ and tried deleteing system, finder, and mac preferences. That made itgive me a folder with a blinking question mark for a few seconds at boot before it loads the OS. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.
 
From the looks of it you were on to a good start by troubleshoting with extensions disabled. It seems to be a Control Panel of Extension that might be causing the freeze up. What was the last thing that was installed on that Mac before it started locking up? If you can answer this, then all you need to do is look for the extension or control panel that was installed by that application, disable it, and then restart the computer with all but the ones you disabled.

If by chance you don't know, then you are going to have to do it one by one. Half of the job is done for you if you select the Mac OS 9 Base option (I believe that's what it's called) under the drop down list in the Extensions Manager. That will only load the control panels and extensions that allow for the OS to function before any third-party extensions/control panels were installed. If it boots OK once you do that, then you can add the third party extensions/control panels one by one until it happens again, which will tell you which is the offending extension/control panel.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out.
 
BTW, if you hold down the space bar after the chime the instant the screen comes up, the Extensions Manager will come up before anything else is loaded, so that should help with your troubleshooting efforts.
 
I just booted up with base extensions and the system locked up. The mouse moves but nothing else responds. I am thinking maybe one of the core components has become corrupted or this thing might have a virus.
 
Your other option is to do a "Clean Install" of the operating system. This will create a new System Folder and will rename the old one to something else (so that it doesn't get included in the startup). Once you have done the clean install, you can move over the extensions/control panels from third-party apps from the old System folder to the newly installed one (one by one of course just to be safe).
 
He actually only has burned copies of OS 9.0 which I cannot seem to boot off of. (Holding C or Command+Option+Shift+Delete does not work) Any idea how to boot off the media outside of a bootsector on the disc?
 
Ugghghghg!! :p

The only thing I can really recommend is to purchase an OS 9 retail CD. OS 9.2 should not be that expensive.

One question....why not go with Mac OS X? Are there applications that you need that run under Classic 9?

The other legal free option :D would be to go with Linux or a BSD flavor. There are a lot of apps available even for the PPC version of Linux. I recommend either Ubuntu/Kubuntu or Debian Sarge. Some will say Yellow Dog Linux or Fedora, but I like the apt packaging system the best. :)
 
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