PowerMac G4 MDD - Refusing boot after forced switch off...

Morning folks.

I'm in a bit of a pickle with this one - my PowerMac G4 MDD was mid-update (updating to 10.5.6) and as it was late and I was in something of a rush I took the usual step of forcing it to shut down, ie., held the power button for a good few seconds.

This was in the hope that OS X would some how pick-up where it left off on the next boot and continue its merry way performing the update.

I was wrong! Very wrong!! All it did was sit there with the "spinny thing" on the Apple logo screen and then it proceeded to eventually continue to switch between a dark blue screen and a light blue screen - I left it for a good 15 minutes or so in the hope that it was trying to repair itself.

I then reset the PRAM, still nothing! In-fact this time around it did the "spinny thing" for a minute or so and then switched itself off!

Further more, the machine won't boot from OS X CD either!

So by now I'm thinking it's a corrupt drive... So I swapped my boot drive with my empty data drive in an attempt to try and install a clean copy of the OS with the PowerMac G4 hooked up to my MacBook in target mode, as in I performed the install from my MacBook onto my PM G4.

The install went fine (once I'd repartitioned the drive as GUID making it bootable) - so then I went to reboot and.... I got a flashing folder with a question mark!!

I'm now totally lost as to what the heck to do!!

There's a SCSI card and a USB 2.0 card in there at the moment - could either of these be causing an issue with regards to the booting?

Any help would seriously be appreciated right now!!

Many thanks and kind regards, Mark.

OrangeSVTguy said:

A G4 PPC will NOT boot from a GUID partition. You have to set it up with an Apple Partition. GUID is for Intel Macs.

Reformat the drive with an Apple partition map and use PPC install disks. The disc from your Intel MB will not work on the G4 or any PPC mac unless it's a Retail DVD of Tiger.

Shutting down in mid-update could corrupt it but your data should still be intact.

Click to expand...

Hi there.

Thanks for your response - I had a funny feeling GUID was wrong; so I've reformatted the drive as Apple Partition and proceed to install Leopard. Unfortunately, it wouldn't let me do so with my PM G4 in target mode through my Mac Book. So the obvious thing is to simply boot from the install DVD and perform the installation that way.

And that's where the other problems come into force - I can't boot from the DVD and I've no idea why!

I'm stuck and I've no idea as to what to do next!

OrangeSVTguy said:

Are you trying to boot from your Macbook DVD? It won't work as it's an Intel and "locked" to only your Macbook. Or is that a Retail DVD of Leopard?

Click to expand...

Hi there.

It's a retail version of Leopard - the PowerMac is 2nd hand and has a fairly recent Pioneer DVD writer installed, could this "maybe" have something to do with it?

I'm seriously clutching a straws here!!

Arghh!!!!

I'm seriously, seriously p***** off with myself at this moment in time - a major school boy error, or rather omission, on my part.

Okay, so I probably destroyed the kernel as a result of the forced power off, but I should still have been able to boot from the DVD drive sat in the tower as a result of holding down C on power up... But no go!

So rather than frantically stressing out (as I clearly did!) and check the most obvious things, such as, remove peripheral cards and CHECK THE DRIVE (there's a clue there!) I proceeded to try and re-install via target, etc., etc., etc.

When all along it was a knackered DVD drive... Swapped the PMG4 drive with one that's sat in my old Windows box, and.... It worked! As in, I booted from my retail Leopard disk and all's tickety-boo.

How much of a fool do I feel? Well, on a scale of "not really" up to "massively so" I'd say I'm sat the top!!!

Thanks for all your help and pointers folks... It's very, very much appreciated.

bizzle said:

You didn't NEED to reinstall. If you had another bootable OS X source, such as a firewire hard drive or flash drive (flash drive is Intel only), you could have downloaded the combo update and installed it onto the broken OS X install on your hard drive. This works almost every time an update goes wrong.

Click to expand...

Certainly good to know for the future - although fingers crossed I hit nothing quite as catatrosphic as this ever again...