G5 Freezing, Restart Error

[ggoerl]

Hello everyone, my friend has a dual 2ghz g5 he got secondhand and has been having a few problems with it. I have somewhat narrowed it down to what I believe may be the hard drive but have other questions. I know it's not ram as I have ran numerous tests, apple diag disk, memtest and techtool. The problems he keeps experiencing is it will randomly freeze and from time to time get the error to hold down the power button and restart the computer. He used to get a kernel panic but it's since gone and hasn't happened for a few weeks. I have just finished the apple diagnostic and it passed all 72 tests.

I have made a second user account and it seems fine so far. So could it just be permissions? I plan on running disk utility.

What would be the diagnosis for if it happened to be the logic board that went bad?

I'm basically looking for opinions and what it might possibly be.

Thanks

 

[kbfr08]

there's so many things that can cause that, it's really hard to say what exactly it could be. I'm thinking it probably has something to do with the CPU overheating from the sounds of it. It's probably worth a shot to put new thermal paste on the CPU and see if that fixes it.

 

[ggoerl]

might I add, it is also hesitant to boot sometimes, it may freeze from time to time during start up.

 

[kbfr08]

might I add, it is also hesitant to boot sometimes, it may freeze from time to time during start up.

Try using another two sticks of ram. If that doesn't work then I'd guess the logic board probably has to be replaced, luckily for you they're relatively cheap... you should have no problem getting one for around $50 shipped Some G5s have an issue with the controller chip on the backside of the logic board overheating and developing bad connections over time.

 

[skinniezinho]

try changing the hdd cable.
I had a problem like yours in a windows machine, it was the hdd cable (sata one right?).
But try more time with another user, if it's that try running disk utility, if it doesn't fix re install your osx.

 

[ggoerl]

I want to believe it's the hdd still, I encountered same problems on the other user account and repaired permissions but didn't fix it. The drive is also partitioned once. Yea, it's a sata drive. Know any good deals on drives anywhere?