imac giving off loud tone

[vinmacguy]

my trusty ol' blueberry since 1999 has recently started giving off a loud tone during start up. it sometimes starts up in a terminal looking text line asking if i want to continue to boot...type "mac-boot" which i do...but then nothing happens so i have to re-start and it boots or i have to put in a OS 10.3.9 boot disk...even though it has the original 8.6 on it.

soooo whats goin on? help..
thanks

 

[beatsme]

my trusty ol' blueberry since 1999 has recently started giving off a loud tone during start up. it sometimes starts up in a terminal looking text line asking if i want to continue to boot...type "mac-boot" which i do...but then nothing happens so i have to re-start and it boots or i have to put in a OS 10.3.9 boot disk...even though it has the original 8.6 on it.

soooo whats goin on? help..
thanks

sorry, can you clarify? You're running OS8.6 on the machine? Or are you running both OS8.6 and OSX10.3.9?

I'd check your firmware against the Apple website and see if you're up to date. And in any case, I'd ditch OS8.6 (which completely sucked IMHO) and at least upgrade to OS9.

Could be your HD is failing, too. If it's the original HD from 1999 I'd have to consider it a distinct possibility.

EDIT: in my experience, a weird tone during startup is usually indicative of a hardware issue. Just so you know...

 

[nagromme]

What's the sound exactly? Macs have different startup chimes that indicate different conditions (none of them good ).

 

[vinmacguy]

clarification about that tone

i am running a partitioned disk with both 9.1 and 10.3.9 on it. the thing is.. i switched hard drives to give to a family member and did the system restore to put everything just like new..and it gave me that message.... i was thinking it may be a firmware problem not a hard drive problem since it did it with two different hard drives..

as far as the tone..it was NOT the chime of death...nor the chime when resetting PRAM...it was like a TV no signal tone.

thanks for feedback

 

[wchong]

maybe the fans are being obstructed by dust?