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G4 Quicksilver won't boot, from DVD or HD

jasperaustin

jasperaustin

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 21, 2015
23
1
Austin
This is a stumper.

Yesterday, I decided to start up my Quicksilver 2002 Dual 1 Ghz with 1.5 mb of RAM, two hard drives and a superdrive. It booted up fine. Today, it won't boot up at all, except on my Tiger DVD disk.

But it wouldn't boot from the DVD at first either, because I wasn't able to get the DVD drive open. But I finally did, by opening with Command+Option+O+F and writing "eject CD." (Wonder if I should go back and type, "boot from hard drive." Yeah, it's a joke.)

Anyway, when I boot from the Tiger DVD it gets to the point where I can either run Disk Utility or reinstall Tiger, and it freezes.

Oh. I did run Command+V, and I get a ton of error messages. Don't know what to do about them, though.

Any ideas?

Mike
PS -- The icon shows my G5. Right now, I have a G5, a G4 and a Mini Mac 2012, my main computer.
 
jasperaustin said:
This is a stumper.

Yesterday, I decided to start up my Quicksilver 2002 Dual 1 Ghz with 1.5 mb of RAM, two hard drives and a superdrive. It booted up fine. Today, it won't boot up at all, except on my Tiger DVD disk.

But it wouldn't boot from the DVD at first either, because I wasn't able to get the DVD drive open. But I finally did, by opening with Command+Option+O+F and writing "eject CD." (Wonder if I should go back and type, "boot from hard drive." Yeah, it's a joke.)

Anyway, when I boot from the Tiger DVD it gets to the point where I can either run Disk Utility or reinstall Tiger, and it freezes.

Oh. I did run Command+V, and I get a ton of error messages. Don't know what to do about them, though.

Any ideas?

Mike
PS -- The icon shows my G5. Right now, I have a G5, a G4 and a Mini Mac 2012, my main computer.
Click to expand...
I would post a couple of pics of the output you get from Verbose mode to start off with. That can help in diagnosing the issue.
 
First of all, try a PRAM reset. cmd+opt+p+r. Hold this down and wait for the computer to chime, and continue holding it down until you get a second chime. This can often clear up a bunch of weird, seemingly unrelated gremlins.

If you can get Disk Utility to run well enough, repair permissions on the drive.

You might also try booting into single user mode by holding command+S while booting. When you reach the command prompt, type /sbin/fsck -fy . This will also perform a file system check/repair.

Finally, you might try booting with Disk Warrior and seeing if you can repair the drive that way.
 
Like MacCubed wrote, at first I thought the startup drive failed. However, I can start it up in both the TechTool Pro and Tiger DVDS, but as soon as I try to run Disk Utility from the Tiger DVD, it freezes. Same thing when I try to run anything from the TechTool Pro DVD.

I'm going to try some of the suggestions here and I'll report back soon.
 
jasperaustin said:
I thought, well, my hard drive failed like MacCubed wrote. However, I can start it up in both TechTool Pro and Tiger, but as soon as I try to run Disk Utility from the DVD, it freezes. Same thing when I try to run anything from the TechTool Pro DVD.

I'm going to try some of the suggestions here and I'll report back soon.
Click to expand...

Sometimes, in rare circumstances, I have seen entire computers freeze once Disk Utility "probes" for the drives. A quick solution to verify my theory is to unplug the ribbon cable to the hard drive and boot off the Tiger disk. If Disk Utility no longer freezes then you know you have one really busted hard drive!
 
Okay, I zapped the Pram. I did that earlier for two chimes, this time I did it for three. Didn't help.

Then I started it up in single-user mode and ran the file system check. It did all that, and at the end read, "volume appears to be OK." That's kind of a good sign, I think.

Then I started up in Verbose mode. A whole litany of verbiage appeared, but one thing that kept repeating read, "Can't determine dependancies for com.apple.driver."

Also read, "Jettisoning kernel linker."

Last line reads, "Login Window Application Started -- Threaded auth" And that's how it ends. Won't continue boot from there.
 
Yeah, I thought this might be too tough for everyone, based on other threads about boot problems I've read here.

It would seem the drive's out, but if it is, why do I get "volume appears OK" after I run check disk from single-user mode? And why can't I boot from the DVD?

Here's a question -- is there a way to repair permissions from single-user mode?
 
Do you have a live Linux CD you could try booting from?
Here's my logic:
I have an iBook that displayed a lot of your symptoms and everything pointed toward hard drive failure and yet disk tools always said it was OK. Booting from a live linux distro worked fine too, it wasn't until forum users pointed out the notorious failing airport card issue in iBooks that everything fell into place - because the airport card was failing, as soon as OSX made a call to the hardware, the system locked with a kernel panic.
It's possible that's what's going on here - a fault on motherboard or peripheral controller, maybe even a graphics card etc that's causing a kernel panic?
 
jasperaustin said:
Okay, I zapped the Pram. I did that earlier for two chimes, this time I did it for three. Didn't help.

Then I started it up in single-user mode and ran the file system check. It did all that, and at the end read, "volume appears to be OK." That's kind of a good sign, I think.

Then I started up in Verbose mode. A whole litany of verbiage appeared, but one thing that kept repeating read, "Can't determine dependancies for com.apple.driver."

Also read, "Jettisoning kernel linker."

Last line reads, "Login Window Application Started -- Threaded auth" And that's how it ends. Won't continue boot from there.
Click to expand...
Can you get a screenshot of the verbiage when it gets to this point?

What you are listing is not necessarily out of the norm. The fact that your Mac gets to the login window and then locks up says that OS X is booting. It's just not advancing to the login window.

P.S., not everything you see in verbose mode is an error. It's simply the system booting and reporting either what it's going to do next or the result of a previous step.
 
jasperaustin said:
No, I can't. Where would the screenshot be stored? On the hard drive, right? And I can't access the hard drive.
Click to expand...
Sorry. I meant to say a picture. Like from a cellphone camera or something. If you can, just snap a shot of the screen when it gets to the point where it says "Login Window Application Started".
 
Okay, good news and bad news. It booted. The bad news? I don't know why.

What I did today was press T and run it in target mode, and connect it to my Mac Mini 2012 via FireWire cable. It wouldn't mount, but it would show up in Disk Utility. Here are some screenshots of that.

BTW, although the HD is labeled OSX Panther, I'm actually running Leopard, 10.5.8. Just didn't change the name.

I wasn't able to mount it, repair it or even erase it.
 

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After I ran the G4 in target mode, I decided to take Altemose's suggestion and unplughe hard drives. Oddly, it wouldn't boot from the Tiger or TechTool disc. So I went back and reconnected the hard drives and it booted.

So the cables were loose, right? I don't know. Why did it boot two days ago? It's not like I've been playing football with the damn thing. Why would the cables be loose.

I have no idea. But we all learned one thing, I think — check disk in single-user mode (command+S at boot) is pretty much useless. It told me everything was hunky dory, that is, the volume appeared to be OK. I guess that's technically true, but if it wouldn't let me mount it, I'd have to say the volume, at that time for whatever reason, was not OK.

Anyway, if I observe anything else I'll post it, but I'd have to say at this point that despite my G4 running, this issue has not been resolved.

Thanks for help,

Mike
PS -- dronecatcher, that's a good idea. I'll hunt down a Linux disk soon.
 
Just a note here…if you noticed when you saw the drive in Disk Utility (from the pictures you showed) the drive was grayed out. That means even though DU saw the drive, the disk was not mounted to the desktop.

You can't format, erase, repair or otherwise work with a disk in DU unless it's first been mounted.

In general, if everything is solidly connected, DU is opened and DU sees a drive as unmounted then that indicates a problem with the drive. In your case it may be because the cable was not in solidly (and that can happen if it was loose to begin with from the normal vibrations inside the case) as you indicated.
 
Found something.

So I'm doing tests with my boot drive, and I think, "where the hell is my second 160mb drive?" I shut down the computer, open her up and remember, right, I didn't plug that one in because I wanted to only test the boot drive.

I plug it back in, and start her up. Nothing. Just a grey screen. I start it from the TechTool pro disk. It recognizes NONE of the hard drives. Hmmm. I shut down, unplug the second drive, and it boots up just nice.

So that's the problem — the boot drive is only recognized when it's plugged in alone. When I plug in the other hard drive, neither of them work. What the hell is causing that?
 
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