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No video on MDD after HDD upgrade

WalnutSpice

WalnutSpice

Suspended
Original poster
Jun 21, 2015
456
92
Canton, Oh
I just added a second 80GB 7200RPM MDD to help speed it up a tad, but when I booted into my Tiger install on the original 60GB HDD I had some issues formating the drive. It kept throwing me errors saying it couldn't unmount the drive and even said my password was wrong a few times (I don't even have a password on this machine). So I figured I'd reboot it into target disk mode and format the drive via firewire 800 on my PowerBook. It booted to TDM but shown no display and only mounted the 60GB drive. I rebooted the MDD to go back into Tiger and try again from there, but no video. This MDD does have a dead PRAM battery, but I've never ran into this before.
The PowerBook G4 I'm typing this on also has a dead PRAM battery and has never had an issue not showing the display on boot.
 
I tried reseating the video card and that did nothing. But I did notice a red light glowing inside and the mouse laser does not light up nor the caps lock key on the keyboard
 

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trust me we have all been there LOL *switches on G5* nothing... Huh... Oh forgot to plug the power cord in *switches G5 on again after plugging in cord* solid white light no bong... Huh... some head scratching Oh I forgot to put the ram back in that I stole from it for my other G5... (I have also forgot to put the Fans back in a few times after changing the ram LOL)
 
havokalien said:
Welcome to the club, everyone falls victim to upgrade focus madness.
Click to expand...
Believe me.... When I swapped the DC IN board in my DLSD I put it all back together, I played some music to test(the sound didn't work before) and I was like "Huh, theres no audio coming from the left side" I look down at my desk and the speaker is just there... I was so mad at myself lol, I had to take the whole thing apart, and then I decided to finally fix the latch
 
Well there are more fun ones like taking an iBook apart and forgetting to slip the speaker cords together before you put all the screws back in, then test it.

Or how about muting it and forgetting that it was muted trying to find out why thee is no sound?

That lime green iBook I have had no sound in OS X , when I did clean install of 10.4.11 it came back , and no issue in OS 9 was really strange. Im thinking a bad kernel or downloaded off the net botched install on that one.
 
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On the pre-Unibody Macbook Pros, there is a heavy cable that connects the DC In board to the bottom of the logic board. If one is-for example-repasting the CPU/GPU-the entire logic board is removed and this cable disconnected to allow it to come free.

Both times I've taken one apart, I managed to not get this cable fully seated on reassembly. It's difficult to test the computer without it being completely reassembled, and it's incredibly frustrating to put the computer back together and realize you didn't seat it the first time around or somehow pulled it out in further work.

For whatever reason, the computer won't boot with this cable disconnected even if a good battery is installed(the battery attaches directly to the logic board). In both cases, I thought I'd bricked the computer(two separate computers) until I took it back apart. Fortunately, the second time, I knew to check there and it started right up.

I had another similar experience with a TiBook. It was a near perfect first generation 400mhz that I bought as "dead" on the LEM Swap. These early Tis are like the Powerbook G3s in that they won't boot with a dead PRAM battery installed but will boot fine if the dead battery is disconnected. The PRAM battery on a Ti is wedged under the right palm rest on top of the optical drive, meaning that the optical drive has to come out and a lot of ribbon cables disconnected to get to the PRAM battery. I took the computer apart, disconnected the battery, then put it all back together. It was still dead as a doornail. Once again, I'd failed to reconnect the ribbon cable from the DC In board-something that must come undone to get the ODD out.

I could regail you plenty of stories of my stupid deeds. At least you didn't inadvertently kill a processor card in a Quad or something like that(not that I've ever done that).
 
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I've got a good story (well more than one!), except I was on the lucky end.

Responded to craigslist ad for a dead mac pro 1.1, which gave a boot chime but wouldn't output video. Owner said he'd picked up the mac from an ecycle place, and before that it was property of Gaylord College of the University of Oklahoma (still had the sticker). He'd tried everything apparently, resetting the firmware, swapping hard drives, checked the ram, nothing worked. Computer would boot, could be put to sleep if there was a bootable HD, but no video. He wanted $100, I politely offered $50, and he took the cash and seemed pleased to have offloaded a computer that looked like a reliced guitar.

Brought it home, cracked it open, lo and behold, unflashed PC graphics card. Popped in a compatible card and what do you know, it worked fine!

Funny thing is the PC graphics card was a HD 4670. Only had to edit a plist file and the problematic card worked great!
 
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