My New PowerMac G5 is Dieing!!

[hob]

OK, for those of you who don't know me at all well I've been using macs for about 2 years now - and computers my entire life... but this has got me stumped, and slightly upset.

I had my G5 for about 3 weeks and left it on pretty much 24/7. I went away for a weekend and switched it off for the first time ever!! When I came back, I switched it on and got a horriffic whirring/clicking sound coming from somewhere inside the top 1/4 - the drive bay area. I fiddled around for a while, what I found worked was switching it off - unplugging the superdrive, and HDD - switching the machine on and plugging them back in.

I don't know if that solution actually worked or if the problem just went away by itself.

Anyway, it did go away until last night. I was listening to some music on my G5 whilst it was running some apps and the display had turned off - I was on the other side of my room. Suddenly... ALL the fans came on FULL BLAST! It was louder than anything I'd ever heard a G5 make. It seemed every single fan was on full blast - this is louder than when the side panel is off.

I switched it to standby, switched it back on again and it fixed itself. I left it as normal and went to sleep - I woke up in the middle of the night. The G5 had woken my mum and she was banging on my door!! Now it seems that both problems are occuring intermittantly at the same time... It's either clicking or blowing or both... What's wrong with my beautiful new machine?!

Hob

 

[punkbass25]

thats what warrantys are for i'd say

give apple a call

 

[shadowmoses]

Maybe when you were away for the weekend someone accidently damaged the machine???? anyhow give apple a call as this shouldnt be happening or pop over to regents street and ask them for there opinion, always keen to help at the genius bar..

Shadow

 

[hob]

Yeah, I'm just waiting to see if anyone recognises the symptoms... I just took the machine apart and unplugged a lot of bits and put it back together - it's definately the top fan between the superdrive and harddisk making the racket - but it's stopped for now!!

 

[zakatov]

Did you run Apple Harware Test?

 

[CiBoys]

Maybe?

is not Intel thats why....

 

[hob]

Did you run Apple Harware Test?

Does it check the fans on the G5 version?

 

[StarbucksSam]

is not Intel thats why....

That was random and pointless.

------

Anyway, I think that you DEFINITELY need to call Apple about this. They won't be nice to you (their customer service has been ******** since like 1998) but... good luck.

 

[mduser63]

I'd call Apple. My G5 has done this once when it kernel panicked. The fans come on full blast as a fail safe so that the machine doesn't burn up if it crashes. So, full blast fans are normal for a lockup, but frequent lockups are most definitely not normal.

 

[supergod]

My 1.6ghz G5 has given me tons of trouble and just about every upgrade of Panther caused a new one. The problem where the fans were fully blowing happened to me on two occasions: the fans actually kicked up papers from my desk and blew them all over the room. I did everything I could to try and find the problem which was all the more annoying because I take fantastic care of my computer. Since installing Tiger I have had no issues of this kind at all: the only problem is that twice the computer refused to wake from sleep and that hasn't happened since the update.

Are you running Tiger?

 

[Eniregnat]

1.) Call Apple. It can't hurt.

2.) the G5 towers are pretty quiet. Do you have the plastic door and the mettle door on? The air flow works best when the doors are on.

3.) Sounds stupid, but is there any disk in the Super drive. An off center or unbalanced piece of media makes an awful racket.

4.) Brave you, unplugging the Superdrive (it's dark in there). If it's an eminent drive failure, check the DiskUtility and look at the bottom for SMART rating.

5.) If you have a friend with a spare FireWire HD, make a bootable backup of the HD on it. Change the boot drive, reboot, and unmount the internal drives (they will spool down and turn off.)-see what happens. If the problem disappears, then it is a drive. If it still persists it could be a bad fan, temp sensor on the MB or Processor.

Just my thoughts, and I could be wrong.

In any case, back it up.