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Help A G4 is dying!!!!

S

SLeitheiser

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 8, 2004
8
0
Minnesota
One of the G4's at the office is about dead. I have run Norton but it won't repair the problem. I know the hard drive has at least 32 GB available but it says it has 0. What do I do? I don't know much about fixing them other than the basic stuff like zapping PRAM, rebuilding desktop and running Norton. I don't want to completely wipe out the hard drive, cuz, our old IS manager wasn't organized and I don't know where the software for the machine is located.

No programs will run. Sharing will not activate. It is basically disabled. It is a G4 running OS 9.2. Luckily we have a spare, so I have a little bit of time to work on it. It started with a message saying hard drive is damaged and to run disk first aid. I ran Norton and it came back with a message something like over 10,000 files have been crosslinked causing both to be corrupt and you should find these files and delete them. Any ideas?
 
Try putting in OS 10.x discs or your mac os 9 discs, erase the drive and install your os all over again.

-aj
 
Right. If 10,000 files are crosslinked, there's not likely anything there worth keeping. Reformat it and reinstall. You may want to select the "write zeros" option to make sure the hard drive is still working properly.

Make sure your servers have good ventilation. And remember the three laws of network computing:
1. Backups.
2. Backups.
3. Backups.
 
You could try taking out the hard drive and putting it in another mac. Than you could copy over the important files and than reinstall the os. You could also try the thing where you can hook the 2 computers together with a firewire cable and hold down t when you start up the broken one. It mounts on the other computer as a firewire hd.
 
NORTON IS THE VIRUS (but mum's the word;))

It sounds as iff the HDD is cooked, broken, has bad sectors, etc... You have two courses of action;

1: Wipe the HDD and install 10.3 or 9.x or whatever, and see how things go.

2: Buy a new HDD and go from there.

P.S: it may be worth taking the old HDD to a data recovery centre If anything of worth is on it.
 
EDIT: Woops, this post I guess doesn't probably apply to your situation, but has anyone else heard about this?


I don't know if this is it, but Macworld mag last month has an article on resetting the PMU (POwer Management Unit) which and reanimate a seeming dead mac...they said to unplug the computer first! In the article they show a pictures of where ti find it inside and pressing it only once- very important as it could keep the PMU chip from responding??? Also the internal battery life would go from five years to two days. they said wait ten seconds, plut it back in and press power button.

Was there a power failure in your office before it crashed? that was one of the causes of needing to reset the PMU chip.

they also talk about resetting the mac's PRAM afer doing the other reset. Please check out the article if you think this might do it...it has more detailed instructions or else I am sure online somplace there is info...know nothing about warrenty and how it would be affected by doing this.
 
Originally posted by flyfish29
I don't know if this is it, but Macworld mag last month has an article on resetting the PMU (POwer Management Unit) which and reanimate a seeming dead mac...they said to unplug the computer first! In the article they show a pictures of where ti find it inside and pressing it only once- very important as it could keep the PMU chip from responding??? Also the internal battery life would go from five years to two days. they said wait ten seconds, plut it back in and press power button.

Was there a power failure in your office before it crashed? that was one of the causes of needing to reset the PMU chip.

they also talk about resetting the mac's PRAM afer doing the other reset. Please check out the article if you think this might do it...it has more detailed instructions or else I am sure online somplace there is info...know nothing about warrenty and how it would be affected by doing this.
Click to expand...

I think the problem with this system is the hard drive has got too corrupted, I don't think its anything to do with the PMU which probably would only need to be reset if the machine didn't boot up.
 
Originally posted by thecow
You could also try the thing where you can hook the 2 computers together with a firewire cable and hold down t when you start up the broken one. It mounts on the other computer as a firewire hd.
Click to expand...

I have tried that when I gotten my new G5 with my B&W. The B&W wasn't very accurate. Copied files where bad and it crashed every 5 minutes. As a standalone it worked fine! So I tried installing 10.3 that came with the G5. After it was installed, it wouldn't start up anymore. After that I formatted the HD and installed 10.3 on it. It works perfectly again! Diskwarrior and Norton both said that the HD was very badly fragmented.
 
My 12" PB did this...

My 12" PB did this with 19 GB of space... happened during a firewire transfer of movie files. I ran the Apple Hardware Test and it said that my HD was bad. Couldnt get it to do a Target drive... Called apple and they had to replace it.

Caleb
 
Originally posted by Opteron
NORTON IS THE VIRUS (but mum's the word;))

It sounds as iff the HDD is cooked, broken, has bad sectors, etc... You have two courses of action;

1: Wipe the HDD and install 10.3 or 9.x or whatever, and see how things go.

2: Buy a new HDD and go from there.

P.S: it may be worth taking the old HDD to a data recovery centre If anything of worth is on it.
Click to expand...
yeah if u cant get the files send it to a disk recovery place and get a new hd theyre not exopensive
 
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