Mr. Mac G5 needs help

[Patth9]

My G5 powermac, dual processors, 1 GB memory, tower has stopped booting.

It went down slowly, at first it would gong and the apple appeared on the monitor, no spinning circle, then no gong, only the white background with apple logo, then nothing.

I'm wondering if my memory sticks have faded out.

Before I purchase memory sticks, (sorry been away from powermac lingo for a while) from Amazon, thought I'd best ask you folks for some guidance. I backed up to my external drive, two days before. I am using the eSata hard drives.

If I can not get my G5 to work again, what adapters do I buy to make the eSata HD work in my G4 tower? I see adaptors online, but I don't have the knowledge to continue.

Sad Lady,

Patt

 

[robertdsc]

The first thing I would do is use the internal SATA connections for your boot drive.

The second thing I would do is to pull out all of the RAM, then install just two sticks in the first two slots labeled 1. G5s require pairs of RAM to be installed, so you have to install two sticks. Test each pair of RAM slots progressively to see if your Mac will boot. I did this for a G5 that recently went out on me. Before I gave up, it had two 1GB sticks in the number 3 slots. It worked, and for my purposes, the 2 GB of RAM was enough, but as long as it works enough to get the Mac to boot, that should be fine.

The third thing I would do is leave the RAM as it is and try to boot using a DVD of your operating system of choice. When you press the power button, hold down either F12 on your keyboard or the left button on your mouse to force the drive open. If the Mac boots from the DVD, repair permissions and run Disk Utility.

 

[Patth9]

Well, robertdsc, did as you suggested. First, however, I had to take an optical drive out of the G4 and put it into the G5 so as to get a Tiger disc ready to pop in, that was fun... I pressed down the F12 key, to no avail.

I will try putting the memory sticks back into the location where they have lived since 2009. The G5 was purchased on ebay used, and has worked since then, however, at times I did get the dreaded "death screen", which may be on the hard drive rather than the motherboard, since before my original G4 died, I would get the death screen; I transferred all content from the G4 HD to the G5 HD, well you get the picture.

Thank you, Robertdsc, for your help. I may just have to look for another G5, or try to go back to the G4. There are three programs I hate to give up, Adobe Photo Delux, Eudora, and AppleWorks. All three have been with me since 1995.