Hello Power Mac G4 issues

Do you have another Mac? If you do, you can hold down the "T" key on the keyboard to put it in target mode. Then take a firewire cable and bridge this power mac to the other mac. If the power mac hard drive shows up on the desktop of the other mac OR you can open Disk Utility and verify a new disk, then I would point to the video card as the culprit.

Are any of the Capacitors bulging or blown?

Also, have you tried booting it up without the CD-rom or Hard drive attached? Old macs should be able to post with only a video card connected (just like a pc.)


These are the only things I can think of. It should still boot even with a bad battery.

 

Well, you could try an NVRAM reset, which is like a PRAM reset except that you hold down apple+option+P+R until you hear the chime twice in a row.

But I'm guessing it's one of two things.... your hard drive or your video card.

I'm guessing you mean Radeon though, since they never made any 64 MB variation of the Rage or Rage 128 for Mac or PC.... I don't think even the Fury MaXX had 64MB, and that was their dual-chip solution (which sucked, btw, lol).

If it's your video card, that would definitely explain why you're not getting any video signal.

If it's your hard drive... well, that shouldn't prevent you from seeing a screen, but I guess maybe it would in certain circumstances. You could try booting from CD.

 

PMU reset (press a button)
New Harddrive? A 10gb HD is ancient and likely to fail due to age.

To determine the mac model, go to everymac.com

 

Whether or not the HD works or is even connected you would at least get a screen that flashes a folder with a question mark indicating no OS found.

After the startup chime can you hear the hard drive grinding away like it is reading data. If so then I would decidedly side with a bad video card. If not the HD may also be bad so try putting in a Mac OS CD and hold the C key while booting. Does the CD drive spin up? If so the Video card is likely bad.

Fortunately you can find most any Rage card for next to nothing on eBay in the Apple components section. Maybe a Radeon 7000, plain Radeon or GeForce 2 for cheap. At those speeds PCI or AGP preference does not really matter. For AGP make sure it is 2x compatible.

What is the CPU speed listed on the back of the Tower? That is one way to help identify the model.

Edit:

You would still get a few seconds of video when first booting then the screen would go blank if the video was being set at a refresh rate the monitor does not support. Or if no driver was found.

 

That card uses an ADC connector and if your Mac is a Single 500 then it would be based on the Sawtooth design which does not have support for ADC as it powers the monitor as well.

If you just want a cheap card that should work try this one. Unlike the one you listed it has a standard DVI connector and should not have issues. This Radeon 7000 is only $10 more and far superior VGA only though. This PCI Rage 128 may go for less than $10, people rarely want them.