Mounting G5 Problems

[Lancer]

I've got a 2005 G5 Tower, got it used on eBay about 4-5 years ago and it's been a good computer but not without it's faults. However recently they have been mounting.

Frequent crashes, not waking up from sleep properly and not being able to re-start without a forced shutdown most of the time.

I've not have many hard crashes with the G5 but recently I've had several 'gray screen of death' where the screen goes dark and a 'you need to restart' box in the middle. Also some where a bunch of text comes down the screen but you can see what you were doing behind. Each time it has restarted without issue. Sometimes after a deep sleep the USB ports have been unresponsive upon waking up.

Now I have several HDDs hooked up via a USB hub and some more network drives I access, I don't know is this is a factor and since I use them daily it's hard to disconnect them and do what I need to do as it can be days before a problems arises. I have a new iMac on the way so once I get that I can do some more testing with this.

My G5 used to go weeks before a restart, but now its only a few days at most.

[rjcalifornia]

I had those issues before with my iMac G4. It was due to a bad RAM and bad HDD. I replaced both and never saw it again.

Run a Hardware Test with the Leopard Install DVD

[Lancer]

Originally Posted by rjcalifornia

I had those issues before with my iMac G4. It was due to a bad RAM and bad HDD. I replaced both and never saw it again.

Run a Hardware Test with the Leopard Install DVD

Thanks for the advice, I'm holding out for my new iMac before I can do much to the G5. At least being a Tower replacing the HDD and RAM is easy. I hope it's not the RAM as 4Gb of that old RAM is still expensive.

I've run the basic HDD check in Disk Utility and it came up good. I upgraded the RAM about 2 years ago, no real problems until the last few months.

[Razzerman II]

G'day

Try turning off the sleep option - it never caused me anything but bother on my G5. Also, have you installed any new software recently? Try disconnecting all the usb drives and see if that makes a difference. Plug them back in one at a time, and give each one a couple of days use before adding the next one.

Good luck,

Ray

[Lancer]

I put the G5 to sleep manually each night as I don't like it running 24/7, so when out and at night it goes to sleep. Main reason is I don't want to have to wait starting it up each time I need it.

When I get my new iMac the external HDDs will move to it so if problems stop then I'll know the cause.

Thanks for the advice, can't wait for my new iMac so I can run some deeper tests on the old G5. I need it to run some older software that no longer run on Intel Mac's. Worse case I might have to look on eBay for another good used G5.

UPDATE - Last night for the first time I can remember I shut down the G5, it started as normal this morning but a weird side effect the attached HDDs didn't spin down over night. Which was weird as when I put the G5 to sleep they were blinking away in standby mode but this morning they were warm and running.