HELP! Is my tower shot?

[yellow kid]

Hey all,

First my G4 dual gig just showed me the folder with the blinking ? mark; then I ran Diskwarrior from my powerbook, rebuilt the directory and it worked for a day.

Then today, the samething, but the disk won't mount, so I can't use DW. Tried running Disk Utility from the Panther install disk and when it came to choose disk to install, no Macintosh HD icon appeared.

Now, it won't even turn on at all. I push the on button and nada.

Any ideas on what is the problem?

thanks,

yk

 

[CanadaRAM]

Could be your hard drive is shot.

Or your power supply.

But before you haul it to the shop, try this:

Unplug all peripherals except the mouse and keyboard.

Open the machine and press the CUDA switch for about 5 seconds (do this only once). The CUDA is a tiny round button in a tiny square mount on the surface of your motherboard somewhere. It may say PWR MGR or CUDA on the motherboard near it. Then try starting up.

If you can't find that CUDA switch, remove your PRAM battery and leave it out overnight. The battery is on the motherboard in a little black plastic cage, it is 1/2 as long as an AA battery. Pry gently outward on the ends of the "cage" and the top half will come off. Do make note of which way the battery is oriented *before* you remove it. You don't want to swap it + for - when you replace it. Look on the battery, there should be a date. If it is more than three years old, invest $12 at an electronic store or Apple dealer and replace it. It's called a 1/2AA 3.6V Lithium battery - it comes either with pigtails or without, you want it "without".

While you have the machine open, inspect all of the internal cables to see that they are fully inserted, and there are no nicks or cuts in them. Press down with mild pressure on your RAM modules and your PCI cards to make sure they are seated.

Replace the existing (or new) battery and try restarting.

Good luck

Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[beatle888]

i am going through the exact same thing with my tibook 667.

i ran the hardware diagnostic cd that came with my system when i first bought and it says that the Mass Storage passed the tests.

but NOTHING can SEE the drive. it spins but wont mount.

this all started after i zapped the pram. i dont know what to do, my friend reffered me to a data recovery shop and they want $800 MINIMUM 😱

i dont know what to do.


anyway, i'll give you the info i came across so far...

http://search.info.apple.com/index.html?q=question+mark&search=Go&lr=lang_en&search=Go


thats a link to apples support page...its pretty thorough on the subject.

also, try restarting and hold down the "T" key. this will bring up any volumes with an OS on it (not in my case unfortunately).

they also said to zap the pram (funny cause thats when this problem of mine STARTED)

they also say to restart and hold down the command+option+shift+delete key.

i even tried to use an OS 9 start up disk since the drive originally came with OS 9 and OS X i thought it might need OS 9 drivers...no luck.

i do remember when i took OS 9 off my drive and reformatted a long time ago that the disk utiltiy said if i dont install the OS 9 drivers i wont be able to boot in 9...and since the question mark folder comes up as an OS 9 style icon im thinking that maybe the problem might be that after zapping the pram it erased something in the pram that the drive needed in order to start up. damn, a minimum of $800 dollars...i could of bought a NEW computer (ibook thats faster than my tibook). 😱 😕

can someone tell me if my drive is dead (even though it spins)


good luck yellowKid. i hope you backed up. i just need ONE file and im gonna have to pay through the nose.

 

[beatle888]

do you know how to reset the CUDA on a powerbook?

 

[yellow kid]

Hey thanks everyone,

Got it working!


I pushed that CUDA button as you suggested and I checked the ram: I had 3 512 gig chips, I pulled one out at a time and tried restarting and was successful on the third try. Guess one of the 2 chips is bad--the third one is Apples's.

Whew! I had a **** load of important work on there--and I never backed anything up. Guess I'll start now.

thanks again, and Happy New Year!

yk

oh, anyone know how the RAM could go bad. We had a power failure on while I was on the comp, and my surge protector is just a cheap powerstrip with a fuse light from Home Depot. Could that have blown the RAM?

 

[beatle888]

thats good news yellowKid.


a question for CanadaRam. do you know how to reset the CUDA on a powerbook? i searched apples site and didnt find anything.

 

[CanadaRAM]

anyone know how the RAM could go bad. We had a power failure on while I was on the comp, and my surge protector is just a cheap powerstrip with a fuse light from Home Depot. Could that have blown the RAM?

That could do it... Not so much the power going out but the surge whem it came back on.

Add a good surge supressor (or even better, a UPS with a line-interactive voltage regulator) to the Firewire backup drive you're getting tomorrow.

do you know how to reset the CUDA on a powerbook?

Well obviously you're not going to open the Powerbook to look for a switch on the motherboard... there are procedures to reset the power manager for each Powerbook model. This page http://urth.acsu.buffalo.edu/~pld/Labstuff/powermgr.html
has 'em all.

Then you can also restart and do the command-option-P-R Parameter RAM reset.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com