iMac G5 (Non-iSight) won't start

[afd]

Hi

A friend of mine has a G5 iMac that won't start. When you press the powerkey it tries to start, the power light glows, the screen goes grey and after a while the fans start whirring. Occasionally (twice in the past couple of days) it has started up, but it froze after a while. Other times the apple logo appears and the gear wheel starts turning but then it freezes.
I have tried booting from DVD, holding down the shift key and have taken the back off and pressed the wee button on the board.
Since my friend has the same model of iMac as me (they were bought at he same time and place) i tried the RAM that I took out of mine when I upgraded.
None of these thing worked, and my TechTool DVD is stuck in it...

Any ideas?

 

[m3coolpix]

Just went through this...

First thing to start with: iMac G5: Troubleshooting when your computer won't turn on

 

[afd]

Thanks for the link m3coolpix, unfortunately I've found that page too and it didn't sort things. The first 3 of the LEDs light and then the fans start.
Am a bit worried that mine will start to go too. I have to manually put it to sleep the past week. I thought it might have been an upgrade to leopard and last weeks updates to leopard and security, but after reading about all these G% power supply problems I'm starting to worry it might be hardware.
Incidentally both of our machines had applecare that run out last november...
Did you manage to sort your Imac m3coolpix?

 

[m3coolpix]

The problem slowly got worse on my iMac G5, eventually to the point of it not starting up anymore. It is most likely the capacitors in the power supply deteriorating slowly (what happened to mine). I confirmed this via some Google searching and the Apple doc I linked.

Here is a how to that someone has on their Blog: How-to-repair-apple-imac-g5

I was able to fix it. Bought a capacitor kit off eBay. Working fine now. If you don't want to get that into swapping of parts and soldering (took me an hour and about $22 of parts, as I already had the tools), then you can just buy the power supply to swap out. Much more $$$ though, and it might also still have the same problem eventually.

 

[afd]

Thanks for the link. I think if mine was dead I might be tempted to try the capacitor thing, but I'd be less confident about working on someone elses mac.

Alan