G4 Cube, powers on but will not boot anything

[Project Alice]

Hi all,

I finally got a G4 cube! Been wanting one for quite some time but the prices are absurd for the things. Anyways, won a cheap auction on ebay for one.

When powered on, there is no chime (do cubes even have an internal speaker?) it boots to a white screen. From the small vent on the opposite side of the optical drive slot I can see a solid red light on the logicboard. There is a hard drive installed, idk what if anything is on it. I can boot the machine to the chooser by holding option, but it stays on the "waiting watch" forever, and does not show any devices, even though I plugged in my FW drive with multiple bootable volumes on it. I've also managed to get a tiger install CD stuck in it, it wont eject it even when booting holding the mouse button. I'll figure that one out later though lol. It won't boot that either while holding down C - just a white screen.

Of course I finally get a G4 cube and the cubeowners site is gone. Everything I find on google about these things is a dead-link that used to go to cubeowners. Is there somewhere else the cube people congregate now? here, or a facebook group?

 

[LightBulbFun]

G4 Cubes dont have an internal speaker so you wont get a chime

the fact you can get to the boot picker is a good sign

it sounds like you may have a bad Hard drive or miss configured slave master device, I would try disconnected the internal HDD and then booting the machine up and see if you can get it to boot from CD or FW

(PS if you can get to an OpenFirmware prompt you can type eject cd to eject a disk in the ODD or eject the tray if its a tray loading mac)

 

[jbarley]

Of course I finally get a G4 cube and the cubeowners site is gone. Everything I find on google about these things is a dead-link that used to go to cubeowners. Is there somewhere else the cube people congregate now? here, or a facebook group?

There's is some info available still...but nothing like back in the "hey-day" of CubeOwners.
https://www.tonymacx86.com/forums/p...w.tonymacx86.com/forums/powermac-g4-cube.138/
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/261550-the-official-mac-g4-cube-thread/
https://web.archive.org/web/20151004123030/http://www.cubeowner.com/forums/index.php?act=idx

 

[eyoungren]

…or miss configured slave master device,…

Question…don't the Cubes use 2.5" laptop drives?

And if so, how would you configure that? I've never seen any jumpers on an IDE laptop drive.

Or is this something you configure elsewhere with the Cube?

I'm asking because I have zero knowledge about these Macs.

 

[LightBulbFun]

Question…don't the Cubes use 2.5" laptop drives?

And if so, how would you configure that? I've never seen any jumpers on an IDE laptop drive.

Or is this something you configure elsewhere with the Cube?

I'm asking because I have zero knowledge about these Macs.

G4 Cubes use regular 3.5 inch HDDs with laptop ODDs

on that note tho

IDE laptop hard drives do have a Slave master cable select jumper block its the 4 extra pins spaced slightly away from the main group of 44 pins

 

[eyoungren]

G4 Cubes use regular 3.5 inch HDDs with laptop ODDs

on that note tho

IDE laptop hard drives do have a Slave master cable select jumper block its the 4 extra pins spaced slightly away from the main group of 44 pins

Thanks! I guess I must have been confusing the Cube with the Mini.

 

[Project Alice]

G4 Cubes dont have an internal speaker so you wont get a chime

the fact you can get to the boot picker is a good sign

it sounds like you may have a bad Hard drive or miss configured slave master device, I would try disconnected the internal HDD and then booting the machine up and see if you can get it to boot from CD or FW

(PS if you can get to an OpenFirmware prompt you can type eject cd to eject a disk in the ODD or eject the tray if its a tray loading mac)

This was actually my first thought... I just rarely get stuff with hard drives setup wrong. But I've definitely had faulty hard drives give me some weird POST issues on PCs in the past...
I'm ending my 4 day work stretch tomorrow so I'll get it figured out.

 

[Project Alice]

It lives!
A previous owner set the optical drive to slave when it should've been on master. It's now working.

Now to figure out a replacement for the god-awful rage 128...