2004 1.8DP has died. Leopard?!

[netcastle]

It's a sad day (also a wasted day) as I have concluded that my G5, only a few months after @care has expired, seems to be taking its last breaths. It started a week or so ago as I routinely leave it on overnight to keep its drives available to the network. It just started freezing. On restart it would just hang on blue. Reset the pram and back up and running until a few hour go by and then frozen again. Restart to blue. Reset Pram... Then came the Kernel panics. Having just recently upgraded to Leopard I though I would revert to Tiger (under which it ran this way for most of its life without a single problem that I can remember) and when I put in the install cd and held down the c key - kernel panic. So I tried to remotely boot from my powerbook and clone the OS onto the powermac boot drive but it just kept on freezing before the clone could complete. It's almost like there is something in there that doesn't want me to get my machine going again. Very frustrating as some of you may know.

Does a machine that has performed so flawlessly for three and a half years just die? Something had to cause this. Could it be the clever new ways that Leopard uses resources that caused my processors undue stress? I have heard a few nightmares with Leopard and G5 owners. Please chime in and lets figure this out.

 

[ideasman69]

stuff dies mate.. i had a dual 1.8 that crapped itself too. fortunately for me it was under warranty.

bite the bullet and buy a new one.

 

[macz1]

A possibility could be bad RAM. I had a machine which began to freeze periodically and after removing one of the RAM modules it didn't freeze again. I was surprised that RAM can go bad after 1-2 years of use, but this can happen.
I would try to start the machine with only one of the RAM modules. But it has to be at least a 512MB stick for leopard

 

[OllyW]

A possibility could be bad RAM. I had a machine which began to freeze periodically and after removing one of the RAM modules it didn't freeze again. I was surprised that RAM can go bad after 1-2 years of use, but this can happen.
I would try to start the machine with only one of the RAM modules. But it has to be at least a 512MB stick for leopard

Don't try it with only one stick, the RAM in the PM G5 must be fitted in matched pairs.

 

[macz1]

Don't try it with only one stick, the RAM in the PM G5 must be fitted in matched pairs.

Oh, you are right, I forgot it. Nevertheless, I would try to look at the RAM and reduce the confguration to the minimum possible.

 

[netcastle]

I'll definitely give that a try and report back. The problem is that I have wiped the entire system and need to get a new boot volume on there and everything I do to try and make that happen ends up in snafu.

I've looked into buying a new machine, but the scary part is that if you are resourceful, you can build a pretty kickin' (sorry, sorry, sorry - it makes me cringe to say it) windoze box for next to nothing. Unfortunately both Mac and Linux are behind the curve when it comes to games and the ability to play HD content. But that is besides the point.

 

[keysersoze]

Check for bulging/leaky capacitors on the motherboard. Telltale sign is brown ooze around the tops of the little cylindrical doo-dads. It happened to one of ours, and means you would need a logic board replacement. I hope its not the case.

 

[netcastle]

Strange. The Tiger disk I was using also caused a Kernel Panic on my PB. It got me to thinking, I might as well check to see if the Leopard install disc would cause a KP as well. It didn't and so I wiped the boot drive clean and thought that I might as well try 10.5 one more time before giving up on the machine. It was that or do something drastic and expensive. Turns out that Leopard installed fine (for the second time) and now, just for kicks I am putting it through its paces doing some h264 encodes. Can't say its a processor issue as I would expect something to manifest itself when pushing the processors to their capacity. Hopefully the previous dirty install, which included some no no's such as application enhancer (which I thought I disposed of at the command line), just didn't mesh right. This being a clean install will be the last hope. Nonetheless, its good to see this machine alive. I have grown quite fond of it.

...a leaky capacitor on a MB is an issue indeed, but I didn't detect any primordial ooze when I went in to play doctor with the RAM and some extra SATA drive I had installed a few years ago.

 

[MacNerd12]

There's still a MDD G4 and a PWM G5 Quad hanging around in my family.

 

[FireArse]

hmmm last gasp...

ok, well here's just a few ideas.

Unplug, unscrew & detach anything other than the Logic Board and the Power to it. (and that means the front panel ports)

Try power on - without RAM the LED should flash. If it doesn't even do that, then you're looking at either one of the CPU's or the MLB.

If it does flash, add one component and test. If it still boots, add another component & repeat. You're otherwise left with a big paperweight. What have you got to loose??

F

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

I was surprised that RAM can go bad after 1-2 years of use, but this can happen.

Well FYI......EVERY electronic component can fail at any time, after 1 day or 10000 days....but it WILL happen eventually.......they just don't last forever......

Having said that, just think about how many old macs from the late 80's & early 90's are still perfectly functional today

 

[netcastle]

Well, haven't turned mine off yet since doing a clean install of leopard and I have to say that I feel a little bad that I blamed it on the new operating system. This computer is running better than it ever has. So strange that one week ago I was contemplating pitching the thing and now it works like its brand new. Hopefully, this machine will be around ten years from now.