G4 PowerMac MDD Display Showing Static

[Dewi_B]

Hi.

I recently bought a G4 PowerMac MDD FW800.

It came with an ATI Radeon 9000 card and an iX3D Ultimate Rez card.

I have a DVI - HDMI adapter plugged into the ATI card.

When I first booted it up, the screen (Samsung C24F 24" Display) showed static before the OS X loading screen. So I would never see the Apple logo.

I wiped the drive and reinstalled OS X 10.4, which appeared to fix the static issue. As I plan to replace the HDD with solid-state storage, I had a go at installing the MacOS9Lives version of Mac OS 9. That worked ok.

I turned off the computer and removed the iX3D card, as I would never use it. When I booted it up, I just got static, and nothing seemed to happen. I tried switching to a DVI - VGA adapter, but that gave a blank screen.

I've reset the PRAM (CMD-OPT-P-R) for three sets of chimes. I've tried disconnecting everything, removing the PRAM battery, and pressing the PMU button, but this hasn't changed.

I reinstalled the iX3D card, and I can get into Open Firmware, but the keyboard stopped responding after a couple of key presses.
I can get to the boot selection screen and start to boot from an OS X DVD, but it appears to hang.
All the output from the iX3D card is at a very low resolution. I'm not sure what resolution it is precisely.

I realise that installing something like MacOS9Lives could be risky.

The motherboard appears in good shape, with no blown or leaking caps. The PRAM battery also appears in good condition and shows 3.6 volts on a multimeter.

Is there anything else I can try? Does it sound like the ATI card is fried (I don't have another computer to test it on or another card to test in this machine)?

 

[Wild Hare]

No, MacOS9Lives download for “Unsupported” machines is not risky actually. If you want both OS 9 and OS X on a single drive - there are certain steps that you might want to take. *Recently outlined here… http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,6641.msg49796.html#msg49796 And yes, you must register to see images there.

But you might want to remove & re-seat the ATI 9000 a few times just in case the contacts on the card (and in the machine) are tarnished, corroded, etc. And then there’s the visual inspection of the card itself for puffed, leaky or non-working capacitors. (Sounds more like poor connections.) You do have another display / monitor to try other than an HDMI?

AND if the machine is that new to you… a good blow-out with canned air (etc.) can’t hurt. Dust is not our friend.

Congrats on the FW800! I'm just beginning to almost "accept" them over the FW400 models.

 

[Dewi_B]

Thanks for that information and for taking the time to reply.

That's good that MacOS9Lives isn't deemed risky. I assumed it was, as it wasn't an officially supported OS on this hardware.

I'll give the card a closer inspection, as you suggested and reseat it a few times. I have some contact cleaner and isopropyl alcohol. I presume it wouldn't hurt to give the contacts on the card and the slot a clean with either of those too.
I have cleaned out the dust. There was surprisingly little in there, so that has all been shifted.

I can go from DVI to VGA on this monitor, or also DVI to VGA to Displayport on another one, although that sounds a bit convoluted.

I'm curious about what you meant about "accepting" the FW800 over the FW400. Is there something about the 800s that aren't looked on too favourably?

I see this as a win, even if I have to spend a bit of money on it, as the eBay advert was for a G3 B&W, which I had in the early 2000s. It turned out the seller didn't understand what he had, and they were actually a pile of G4 400s with this single MDD sitting amongst them. He said take your pick, so I grabbed this. And all for £50.

 

[Dewi_B]

Just a quick update, the issue now seems to be resolved.
I cleaned the contacts and installed and reinstalled the GPU a few times.

Initially, it didn't seem to make a difference. However, after trying HDMI, I went to plug the DVI to VGA adapter back in and noticed that the two adapters I have were different. One has some pins missing.

I plugged in the one containing all of the pins and got the display back. I was then able to reinstall OS X Tiger. After this, the HDMI started working again too.

 

[Wild Hare]

I'm curious about what you meant about "accepting" the FW800 over the FW400.

I’m very “MacOS 9 - Centric” here and given the fact that the FW800 MDDs weren’t originally capable of booting / running OS 9 natively, I preferred the FW400 MDDs as being top-of-the-heap for running OS 9. Also, given the fact that one loses the FW400 ports and the single FW800 port performs only @ FW400 rate (with the use of the “Unsupported” OS 9 ) I previously opted instead to transplant the FW800 1.42 GHz DPs CPUs and their copper heatsinks into MDD FW400 models.

Only just recently tested the approach of installing Tiger and Leopard on a multi-boot, single drive in a FW800 - which allows the use of the three versions of the MacOS without the typical BTree error problems associated with OS 9 and other versions of OS X within several Macs. Have yet to test the addition of a FW400 card (under OS 9) in the FW800 machines to see if possible to obtain more than the one FW800 port = FW400. But that’s soon to be addressed.

In the meantime, the "Firewire 800" models have faster optical drives and support for onboard AirPort Extreme (802.11g) and Bluetooth 1.1. Which also makes the FW800 models a bit more acceptable to me.

*You didn’t mention which processor your machine has, but if it’s a 1.0 GHz - there’s a single resistor that you can rather simply remove from the mobo’s backside to increase your bus speed from 133 MHz to 167 Mhz. http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,6285.msg47043.html#msg47043

But great news indeed, that you've solved the static problem!

 

[Dewi_B]

Thanks for sharing that. It's nice to get other people's perspectives on things like this.
I must admit I do have a bit of a soft spot for Mac OS 9. I have a 1GHz G4 eMac, sadly, one of the models that doesn't natively boot into OS 9. But I might try MacOS9Lives on that one.

These are the G4 1.25GHz processors, so this is already at 167Mhz. But thank you for that extra info.