my G4 won't turn off....

Post more info your system such as operating system and which g4 you are using then iam sure someone will be able to help! and yes we hate the beachball!

Ah, yes

I heard it called the 'spinning psychadelic pizza of death'.

Do you have multiple accounts set up in Jaguar or single user? Sometimes logging out and logging back in takes care of the problem. I had that happen to me for a while, but it eventually went away...I have no idea what I did. Also, how long are you waiting until you force it off? Sometimes Jag needs to do some 'stuff' before it shuts off (I've had it take over 2 minutes to sleep). You also may want to boot from the OS X CD and use disk utility to repair permissions...

I'm no expert, so I don't know how much this will help. Maybe a uber-user will jump in with a definite solution....

Good luck.

couple more things are you booting into os 9 or 10 on start up, do you have any other drives connected to it? do you mess with fonts? sounds like its trying to work on something when turning off you use multiple users?do you use energy saver?etc kind of give a breakdown on what you do with machine how it is set up when it started etc etc. be complete on everything. Macrumors has people that visit that are mac geniuses sorry iam not one but maybe someday. Also just my own advice if you dont need classic os9 for anything dont even use it or have it because it is old obsolete and toublesome compared to osx though some diehard os9 users may argue.

I found 3 reasons where sleeping or shutting down sometimes could take a couple of minutes:

- FireWire over IP beta (turning it off is enough)
- Mounted SMB shares (win2k machine)
- A faulty, scratched CD or DVD in the internal DVD player

Have you ever repaired the disk permissions or defrag the drive?

You may also want to boot into Unix (console) mode by holding Apple key+ s at start up and type fsck –y to see if you have modified files!!
To get out of Unix mode type reboot.

Good Luck!!!!

Yes you'll need to do the fsck -y. My iMac had this same problem, it wouldn't shut down and wouldn't retain some system settings, which i'd imagine are written to the disk during shutdown. Also repair permissions. Defragging won't help this problem. To repair permissions, you'll need to boot from the OS X install disc, i don't remember which app you have to run- someone else help me out here?

pnw

Disk Utility is the app that you'll need to use to repair permissions.

My advice:

Pull the plug out.

Originally posted by MrMacman
My advice:

Pull the plug out.

Click to expand...

LOLOLOLOL

I had a problem similar to this, if you have any FW cables or USB devices attached pull them out, when I pulled my firewire cable the computer shut down. That might do it!