Have you tried to replacing both the hard drive cable and the hard drive? If you have, eyoungren may be correct that the PATA controller is starting to fail. Have you tried putting the hard drive on the ODD bus?
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New G4! Help?!
- Thread starter beanboy89
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You may have an IDE drive controller failure.
That would be the logicboard…
That seems to be the most likely problem at this point.
I've tried with two different hard drives and two different IDE cables, which were previously working when I pulled them from other computers. Unless they've gone bad in the past week, I'm leaning toward the controller error. Trying the hard drive on the optical drive IDE port is the next thing I'm going to try. Is each IDE/PATA port on the logic board using a different controller?
Let's assume just for the moment that I am right and it is a controller failure. Don't think that's the end - because it's not.
You can work around this, the choice is either to use an IDE PCI card or a SATA PCI card. You'd hook your drives up to the PCI card. Both types of cards can be had for a good price on eBay.
I would take the option to go with a SATA PCI card. The older IDE cards are harder to find and SATA would give you a faster Mac. That's up to you of course, but one or the other would still allow you to use the Mac.
the machine did not come with OS X and had OS 9 drivers as a start up partition. When OS X hit it took longer and needed a cuda reset if 10 was all you were going to use. Back when pram and vram resets were the norm but whatever. But you can believe whatever you want.
It doesn't matter what the machine came with. OS X doesn't use the OS 9 drivers at all, neither does the machine unless one is trying to boot OS 9 on it. Early versions of OS X did need a PRAM/CUDA reset, but more moder versions such as 10.3 and higher don't. Either way, why are you going about this when the problem has been discovered to be the disk I/O error message.
Here's a bit of a long-term update, and I don't want to jinx anything here, but ever since I've replaced that IDE cable, the computer has been booting just fine. I closely inspected the IDE cable that I took out of the G4 and I've noticed that there are a few nicks in one of the wires of the cable, and I can actually see exposed metal inside the cable. That might have been the problem.
Anyway, In the past few weeks, I've ordered two 512 MB sticks of SDRAM and a Radeon 7500 for the G4, and then I also picked up a second Graphite G4 locally on Craigslist for next to nothing. It's another 400 MHz model that seems to be functioning fine.
Here's my Power Mac G4 family picture:
Anyway, In the past few weeks, I've ordered two 512 MB sticks of SDRAM and a Radeon 7500 for the G4, and then I also picked up a second Graphite G4 locally on Craigslist for next to nothing. It's another 400 MHz model that seems to be functioning fine.
Here's my Power Mac G4 family picture:
No, that's damage.SOm
Like this?
That looks like physical damage to me.
Is it possible that those boot and disk errors could have been caused by that damage to the cable?
Yes. And hopefully, that will resolve it. It's always nice when the problem is something that is very easy and cheap to replace.
Had that happen numerous times and the data errors often occur if the insulation is broken on two or more ribbons and they touch or if the cable grounds against the case or other metal!
Quite possible, in fact most likely!
I've actually gone both ways with this. My late '07 MB will boot from APM volumes, and I've TDM booted it into Leopard from a TiBook