eMac giving up the ghost?

[SkyBell]

A few nights ago, we had a power outage at some point during the night, and I woke up to find my eMac powered off. I turned it back on, it fully booted and I began to do a bit of browsing. A few minutes later, the CRT instantly goes completely black. (this happens often if the machine is powered off or is allowed to go to sleep, and for this reason I always leave it running.) So I force it to shut down, wait about 15 minutes, and turn it back on. But instead of booting, it sits at the grey Apple screen with the spinning circle of lines (...or whatever it's called) and stays there. In hindsight, I should have come here for help at that point but for whatever reason the only solution I saw was to reinstall OS X.

Thankfully, I had very few files located on its hard drive that I don't have copies of, and none of them really important. So I precede to pop in my 10.5 disc and give it ago. Things work well for most of the process, until we get to the "About 10 minutes remaining" message. At this point, the loading bar still appears to be signalling progress, but I can no longer hear the optical drive nor the hard drive making any noise. I've let it sit there for about half an hour with no changes, and I've tried twice.

Now, I do admit that my 10.5 disc is not in the best of shape - but it hasn't been terribly abused either. Could it still be the issue I'm having? And for why I'm doing this in the first place, could I have corrupted system files on the hard drive when I forced it to shut down? Or something else?

Thanks for your help!

 

[eyoungren]

More than likely your hard drive has gone bad. With or without the outage that might have occurred, but the outage probably didn't help.

Can you use Disk Utility inside the installer to verify the SMART status? You might also try using it to erase the drive and then try reinstalling OS X if the SMART status reports ok.

 

[for this]

IME, the progress bar will stay very long at the end of process every time I install Leopard from the disc.
How long? I'm not sure but it is certainly longer than 15 mins (try waiting for 2 hrs then). Anyway, the symptoms you described doesn't sound good.

 

[CubeHacker]

The install disc should verify the integrity of the optical media before starting the installation (unless you intentionally skipped it). If that check passed, then the installer can read ever sector of the disc, thus taking that out of the equation. It sounds more like the hard drive has gone bad, or perhaps even worse - a failing capacitor inside of the machine.

 

[128keaton]

Man, that sucks. When I did an install of Leopard on my iMac G4, it took forever as well. Mine eventually finished, but it also sounds like your HDD could be having trouble. Good luck.

 

[roadbloc]

Sorry to hear your eMac is having trouble. From what I understand, you're quite attached to it. I'd be heartbroken if something happened to my iMac G4. Either way, I hope your issue is as simple as a deteriorating HDD and not something more serious.

 

[MatthewLTL]

I bought my eMac in Feb. or 2012, bought my PowerMac in September or october of the same year, Since Feburary 2012 my eMac has been in use pretty much DAILY until May of 2014, when i got the PDS computer i replaced it with, My eMac has been used daily (again) Since January 2015 when the PDS died. My eMac has seen more use than my PowerMac, Infact, I have only used the PowerMac a few times since the board and processor upgrades, Mainly i have the PowerMac on hand as a backup, I will fire it up once a month or so just to update TFF and TFB but that's about it. Once I get a GPU for it eventually I plan to eventually use it to replace the emac as the primary use machine right now though, Its limited by it's lack of a good GPU and a SATA card making my eMac a better choice to use for what i use my computer for.

I did have this problem once, Try checking your RAM, a bad stick of RAM would cause this for me and make EVERY attempt at installing leopard fail. Tiger installed fine but would KP on boot.

 

[poiihy]

I bought my eMac in Feb. or 2012, bought my PowerMac in September or october of the same year, Since Feburary 2012 my eMac has been in use pretty much DAILY until May of 2014, when i got the PDS computer i replaced it with, My eMac has been used daily (again) Since January 2015 when the PDS died. My eMac has seen more use than my PowerMac, Infact, I have only used the PowerMac a few times since the board and processor upgrades, Mainly i have the PowerMac on hand as a backup, I will fire it up once a month or so just to update TFF and TFB but that's about it. Once I get a GPU for it eventually I plan to eventually use it to replace the emac as the primary use machine right now though, Its limited by it's lack of a good GPU and a SATA card making my eMac a better choice to use for what i use my computer for.

I did have this problem once, Try checking your RAM, a bad stick of RAM would cause this for me and make EVERY attempt at installing leopard fail. Tiger installed fine but would KP on boot.

What is a "PDS" computer?

 

[MatthewLTL]

What is a "PDS" computer?

PDS (or PDSInc) is a now-defunct business computer manufacture they made computers strictly for the business market. Only places I ever saw them were from clinics and hospitals. The specific one I aquired came from a local business (based on the registration info in My Computer). I think they went out of business sometime after the Socket 775 was replaced as most PDS computer i saw either had P4s or some other low end single or dual core CPU.

 

[---eMac---]

I appreciate the eMac. Every time one of these Mac stops working, it saddens me. I have had many Mac models, but the eMac are those who still use as primary computers.

Fix your eMac. He will never abandon you!

 

[MatthewLTL]

I appreciate the eMac. Every time one of these Mac stops working, it saddens me. I have had many Mac models, but the eMac are those who still use as primary computers.

Fix your eMac. He will never abandon you!

I AGREE! My eMac has been rock-solid and dependable since i bought it over 3 years ago! other than it being slow right now because of only 512MB RAM its never let me down! best $80 i ever spent!

 

[SkyBell]

Sorry for the late response, for whatever reason I haven't had the motivation to work on the issue lately; however, yesterday I finally decided to give it another shot.

As per eyoungren's suggestion, I ran Disk Utility and verified my hard drive, with passed almost immediately with no issues. So, I decided on a lark to give the Leopard installation one last shot.

As it is wont to do, the CRT gave out about two thirds of the way through the installation process, so I no longer had a way of checking on its progress. But I gave it about an hour or maybe a little more, and listened for any signs of the optical drive or HDD spinning, and there were none. So I held the power button to shut it down, and at that point had to leave for work. When I returned later that night, I hit the button and crossed my fingers.

Well, this post is brought to you by my once-again functioning eMac!

You have no idea how I happy I was to see that "Welcome" start up video.

However, today I seem to have run into a familiar issue: I tried to update OS X and iTunes through software update. First off, after downloading both, it tells me something along the lines of "some package values were changed, either by Apple or an outside party, and iTunes cannot be installed." I've never seen a message like that before, but if that was really the case I decided to just update it manually when the time came. But when restarting to install the update to 10.5.8, I got stuck right here

I say "familiar problem", because my late 2006 Intel iMac gets stuck at the exact same place with the same update. I left that one running overnight and came back the next morning to see it right where it was, and subsequent attempts failed at the same point. I've only tried once on my eMac so far, but I suspect that I'll likely hit the same roadblock.

Any ideas on to why this might be? I'm really considering just reverting back to 10.4 at this point.

 

[eyoungren]

Sorry for the late response, for whatever reason I haven't had the motivation to work on the issue lately; however, yesterday I finally decided to give it another shot.

As per eyoungren's suggestion, I ran Disk Utility and verified my hard drive, with passed almost immediately with no issues. So, I decided on a lark to give the Leopard installation one last shot.

As it is wont to do, the CRT gave out about two thirds of the way through the installation process, so I no longer had a way of checking on its progress. But I gave it about an hour or maybe a little more, and listened for any signs of the optical drive or HDD spinning, and there were none. So I held the power button to shut it down, and at that point had to leave for work. When I returned later that night, I hit the button and crossed my fingers.

Well, this post is brought to you by my once-again functioning eMac!

You have no idea how I happy I was to see that "Welcome" start up video.

However, today I seem to have run into a familiar issue: I tried to update OS X and iTunes through software update. First off, after downloading both, it tells me something along the lines of "some package values were changed, either by Apple or an outside party, and iTunes cannot be installed." I've never seen a message like that before, but if that was really the case I decided to just update it manually when the time came. But when restarting to install the update to 10.5.8, I got stuck right here

I say "familiar problem", because my late 2006 Intel iMac gets stuck at the exact same place with the same update. I left that one running overnight and came back the next morning to see it right where it was, and subsequent attempts failed at the same point. I've only tried once on my eMac so far, but I suspect that I'll likely hit the same roadblock.

Any ideas on to why this might be? I'm really considering just reverting back to 10.4 at this point.

When you run the updater there is an option to "Show Errors and Progress". If you select that a window will be shown that allows you to follow everything the installer/updater is doing.

This may give you a hint as to what is going on when the installer/udpater gets stuck at that spot.

 

[Dronecatcher]

I say "familiar problem", because my late 2006 Intel iMac gets stuck at the exact same place with the same update. I left that one running overnight and came back the next morning to see it right where it was, and subsequent attempts failed at the same point. I've only tried once on my eMac so far, but I suspect that I'll likely hit the same roadblock.

Any ideas on to why this might be? I'm really considering just reverting back to 10.4 at this point.

Over the years I had this problem many times with Leopard - either the install would take forever to complete or it would be stuck like yours.
Recently I installed Leopard on a machine and tried running the 10.5.8 update from a previously saved package file - just wouldn't have it, stuck at the same point as yours. I found the update as an img file and that worked fine.

In every stuck case I had to repeat with a fresh install.

I'd try again but first zero out the drive to map out any bad sectors that might be affecting the install.