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Attempting to Make a G4 DA Work - With Failure!

gavinstubbs09

gavinstubbs09

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 17, 2013
1,386
256
NorCal boonies ~~~by Reno sorta
So I grabbed my 466MHz DA out of the closet, I originally purchased this machine on April 15, 2014 for $5 from a guy in Santa Cruz (who lived right up the road from the famous Mystery Spot in SC). Worked great and after a while I shoved it into storage.

I planned to make this a great writeup story with it's new GPU and SATA hard drive but that failed quite miserably.

Machine would kernel panic whenever I booted off of a Tiger disc (tried 2 DVDs) and after messing with memory I was able to make it beep so I swapped RAM again (with 6 different sticks) until it stopped beeping. I also removed everything inside the case so all it would have was the optical drive as the only accessory, and unfortunately it would still kernel panic. Swapped in a different IDE ODD to no avail. Then I plugged in a SATA disc drive, it would try to boot and again a KP.

I did find out that I had to press the little button on the motherboard every time to make it boot up.

So, does anyone have any idea what I should try next to make this thing work? If not I'm just going to gut it and use the case.
 
You seem to have covered all the bases I can think of.
For want of anything else to try, try a different PSU?
Then the CPU daughter board?
 
Don't gut it yet! Surely someone on here must have a better solution?!
 
gavinstubbs09 said:
Last night it would require using the CUDA switch after every time I unplugged it to make it boot. But maybe someone does have a solution, this thing put a dent in my evening!!
Click to expand...
Really sounds like a PSU issue. Maybe adapt an ATX psu for the task?
 
How far off plug and play is an ATX PSU, assuming that for a test, you wouldn't necessarily need to close the door?
 
oi! said:
How far off plug and play is an ATX PSU, assuming that for a test, you wouldn't necessarily need to close the door?
Click to expand...

The ATX plug is 20 pin vs. 24 pin like the DA PSUs. Aside from the lack of +24V in your typical ATX PSU(which isn't necessary for any G4 unless you want to run an ADC display), one other important difference is in the fact that the pinouts are quite different vs. ATX.

Beige G3s could actually use an ATX PSU by switching a jumper on the logic board...unfortunately that's long gone.
 
I assume you've made sure it has a working battery inside? I have the same machine and it would KP when trying to boot the Leopard DVD until the battery was replaced.
 
647156 said:
I assume you've made sure it has a working battery inside? I have the same machine and it would KP when trying to boot the Leopard DVD until the battery was replaced.
Click to expand...

Sure as s*** you were right. I took the battery from the MDD board I pulled out earlier today... and it booted the Tiger installer!

Anyone have a processor upgrade they want to sell for this thing?
 
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