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Dead Powermac G3?

Dronecatcher

Dronecatcher

macrumors 603
Original poster
Jun 17, 2014
5,278
7,940
Lincolnshire, UK
Well...I've just bought what I thought was a great deal - a 17" Apple Studio CRT and a Powermac G3, in Apple boxes for £8.50.
After setting up and checking the system, everything was working fine but as it only had 192Mb RAM, I decided to swap sticks with my G3 iMac and put 512Mb in there. Turned it off, opened the door, swapped RAM, closed it up and hit the power button. Silence. Not even a click.
I swapped the old RAM back, moved into different slots, used another power cable and still no sign of life.
Has the PSU quietly died without a sound or am I missing something really obvious? Oh, I removed the PRAM battery too as I think it's exhausted.
 
Dronecatcher said:
Well...I've just bought what I thought was a great deal - a 17" Apple Studio CRT and a Powermac G3, in Apple boxes for £8.50.
After setting up and checking the system, everything was working fine but as it only had 192Mb RAM, I decided to swap sticks with my G3 iMac and put 512Mb in there. Turned it off, opened the door, swapped RAM, closed it up and hit the power button. Silence. Not even a click.
I swapped the old RAM back, moved into different slots, used another power cable and still no sign of life.
Has the PSU quietly died without a sound or am I missing something really obvious? Oh, I removed the PRAM battery too as I think it's exhausted.
Click to expand...
Put the PRAM battery back.
 
Hmmm....reseated GPU and it's booted :) I took the PRAM cell out after it stopped working, haven't replaced it - is that normally a showstopper?
 
Dronecatcher said:
Hmmm....reseated GPU and it's booted :) I took the PRAM cell out after it stopped working, haven't replaced it - is that normally a showstopper?
Click to expand...
No idea. Just a guess.

Maybe the GPU was slightly unseated and that little bit of moving around was enough to cause the issue.

Glad it's working now though.

These are still really cool Macs. Love that mine just purrs along serving files in the background.
 
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And.... it's dead again. I'll leave it unplugged for a while a try again...and zap the PRAM this time. I bought the bundle for the CRT but it would be nice if the Powermac was functional too. At that price is was worth it for the Apple keyboard and puck mouse alone.
 
Dronecatcher said:
And.... it's dead again. I'll leave it unplugged for a while a try again...and zap the PRAM this time. I bought the bundle for the CRT but it would be nice if the Powermac was functional too. At that price is was worth it for the Apple keyboard and puck mouse alone.
Click to expand...
It's probably the PSU then I would guess.
 
Probably the PSU.
I once had the same problem with a PC.
Reseating the graphics card always fixed the non-booting issue.
After 2-3 years the PSU finally died so I think it's showing early signs of falling components. It can however still continue to operate like in my case but I would probably check capacitors in the PSU.
 
philgxxd said:
Probably the PSU.
I once had the same problem with a PC.
Reseating the graphics card always fixed the non-booting issue.
After 2-3 years the PSU finally died so I think it's showing early signs of falling components. It can however still continue to operate like in my case but I would probably check capacitors in the PSU.
Click to expand...

Funny how I had it on and off at least ten times but it went wonky after I changed RAM. At the moment it's been behaving whilst installing Tiger - if it goes cranky again I'll just break it for parts - it's got a CD burner and a Zip drive that'll be useful.
 
Last edited:
Sounds an awful lot like my 17" PowerMac G4. I can consistently get it to boot by resetting the PMU. If I leave it unplugged for some (as yet unknown) period of time it will boot without requiring me to reset the PMU.
 
Yes, it was one of those collection only deals - just 7 miles down the road..hardest part was fitting two huge boxes in my 2 seater car :) The monitor completely took up the passenger seat and prevented the gear stick from going to 1st or 2nd...and I couldn't see out of my left window, so i negotiated a route back where I only took left turns :)
[doublepost=1520192707][/doublepost]I've just ecountered this error whilst using software update - never seen this before, a recent thing or more problems with the G3?

Picture 1.png
 
Dronecatcher said:
Yes, it was one of those collection only deals - just 7 miles down the road..hardest part was fitting two huge boxes in my 2 seater car :) The monitor completely took up the passenger seat and prevented the gear stick from going to 1st or 2nd...and I couldn't see out of my left window, so i negotiated a route back where I only took left turns :)
[doublepost=1520192707][/doublepost]I've just ecountered this error whilst using software update - never seen this before, a recent thing or more problems with the G3?

View attachment 753225
Click to expand...
Possibly the signing certificate for the patches has expired?
 
Is the time set correctly? Sometimes that messes with certificates. Especially since the PRAM battery was removed, and it holds time settings.
 
I've thrown the towel in - it won't verify any expanded disk images, throws up checksum errors, won't recogise my Firewire drive..and is refusing to boot again.
As for the CRT - incredible picture quality but it's sparking now and the picture ducks in and out. Doh...spares it is.
 
Ah, that's a shame. Really though, you can't go wrong with that price, even broken. If it won't do any of that stuff, there's probably quite a few messed up parts!
 
I can attest to the power issue. The B&W (it's a B&W, right?) is a weird beast, and sometimes refuses to boot when you mess with it. RAM changes, drive changes, etc. seem to do strange things to it, and it'll just sit there and be stubborn for a while. Sometimes pressing the CUDA button will get it to boot, and it'll run fine.... for a while.

Did you try updates, disk images, etc. again after swapping the original RAM back into the machine? I wonder if your machine is fussy about the RAM.
 
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swamprock said:
Did you try updates, disk images, etc. again after swapping the original RAM back into the machine? I wonder if your machine is fussy about the RAM.
Click to expand...

No, I didn't. Suppose I could give it a try but I immediately swapped the RAM back first when it was refusing to boot. My problem is I have little patience nowadays ;)
 
swamprock said:
I can attest to the power issue. The B&W (it's a B&W, right?) is a weird beast, and sometimes refuses to boot when you mess with it. RAM changes, drive changes, etc. seem to do strange things to it, and it'll just sit there and be stubborn for a while. Sometimes pressing the CUDA button will get it to boot, and it'll run fine.... for a while.

Did you try updates, disk images, etc. again after swapping the original RAM back into the machine? I wonder if your machine is fussy about the RAM.
Click to expand...


Can attest to this. I have been using my B/W recently to try to format SCSI drives for my SEs as I was struggling with a pair of Compaq drives I bought for them. Caused no end of issues, leaving the B/W unbootable until left alone for a while to calm down. Sometimes a day or so. Eventually, the GPU started failing causing booting issues rather than screen artefacts so it took a while for me to cotton on to what was happening. This was followed by one of the RAM sticks dying, which also caused the B/W to chime but not to boot.

This thing needs low density RAM with chips on both sides. It should run with single sided hi-density sticks, as mine is now but only at half capacity. Mine is a rev A board and those are finicky at the best of times.

I had my eye on the same item hoping for a rev B unit but Lincolnshire was a tad too far to make it worthwhile for me.
 
Wow, I never knew G3s were so particular about what they need to run! What I'm getting from this thread is 'Don't buy a B/W':D
 
AL1630 said:
Wow, I never knew G3s were so particular about what they need to run! What I'm getting from this thread is 'Don't buy a B/W':D
Click to expand...

They were a halfway house between old and new world Macs (like the PowerBook G3 Lombard) and are interesting for that alone, plus the inclusion of an ADB port alongside onboard USB ports make them ideal for exploring Rhapsody builds. However, they did have their share of problems.
 
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