G4 won't power on

[SCSI]

It started off innocently. Here's the story as I typed it to a friend via chat.

You'll never believe this...
You know how you set out to do one thing and then it spirals out of control?
The set builder here has this old ass OS 9 program that he uses...
I upgraded his G3 to a G4 that was freed up last week
Installed 10.3.9 from an image
Installed OS 9 that I had to do via an external dvd drive because the internal was hosed
He installs his OS 9 program and gets that working
I swap out the internal CD drive, life is good now, right?
Then...
He wants me to install a printer in OS 9.
Easy enough, go to the chooser and pick one
Well, it doesn't see a specific network printer
So I'm trying to figure out where I can just put in an IP address and point the chooser there.
After futzing with it for awhile, I thought it would be better to boot to OS 9 and work with the actual OS 9 finder.
I reboot and now it doesn't see the startup disc
I get the blinking floppy image
So I hold down option during boot so I can choose which OS to boot to
It only sees the HD, not the OSs and it won't boot to the HD
I put in an OS disc to boot to
The drive doesn't work
I grab the external DVD drive to boot to
It doesn't recognize it
I grab a FW HD to boot to
It doesn't see it
I open the mac up and reset the PMU which is the power management unit hoping that will zap the memory on it
That worked.
And now it doesn't turn on.
I press the button, the light comes on and goes off as soon as my finger is no longer touching the button.
Any ideas?

 

[2nyRiggz]

You might need to open that thing back up and see if everything is in its place.

Okay just to clear up....you installed OS 9 & 10.3.9 on the drive by the way of external?
You upgraded a G3 to a G4...by removing the G3 and replacing it with a G4 without any problems?

You removed the original CD drive out of the G3/G4 hybrid...sounds like it is not recognizing that drive.

What are we talking about here...laptop or desktop?



Bless

 

[Makosuke]

It sounds like you might have a motherboard problem based on the "progressively worse" symptoms, but I've seen symptoms similar to that happen after a power failure that turned out to just be in need of a "thorough" reset.

You already pushed the PMU, but try this: Open it up, pull the internal battery, unplug it from the wall, and push the power button. It'll probably flash for a second before running out the capacitors inside. Now let it sit, unplugged, for a while--at least 10 minutes (that was enough the time I did it), though I've heard of it taking as long as 24 hours.

Once you've waited a while, plug it back in, put the battery in, hit the PMU reset button once, and then start up and reset both the PRAM and do an Open Firmware reset ("reset-nvram", "reset-all"). And hope for the best.

If that doesn't do it and everything on the motherboard is seated well like the previous poster suggested (the RAM is all the way in, etc), then it's probably a bum motherboard. You could try pulling the internal hard drive and just leaving an optical in, on the off chance the drive is bad and screwing up the IDE bus, but that seems unlikely. Bummer.

 

[CanadaRAM]

You didn't say how old the machine is -- have you replaced the PRAM battery?

REsetting the PMU may have tipped it over the edge from almost-dead to Dead.

 

[SCSI]

I believe (I'm not certain) 10.3.9 had previously been installed via a dmg using a firewire hard drive.

I swapped out a users G3 with a 733 mhz G4 tower. It was functioning fine for 3 days prior to the events explained in my first post.

You might need to open that thing back up and see if everything is in its place.

Okay just to clear up....you installed OS 9 & 10.3.9 on the drive by the way of external?
You upgraded a G3 to a G4...by removing the G3 and replacing it with a G4 without any problems?

You removed the original CD drive out of the G3/G4 hybrid...sounds like it is not recognizing that drive.

What are we talking about here...laptop or desktop?



Bless