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PowerMac G4 Project From Hell.

A

applegeek13

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 7, 2009
113
0
I have a dual 1.25 FW800 Power Mac G4. Any time I fix something, something else goes wrong. Am I cursed?

In all seriousness, however, this machine is getting on my nerves. I recently swapped the RAM and reinstalled Leopard. No no applications will load. They'll bounce for about a minute, then I'll get the "Application X has crashed unexpectedly" error. I haven't tried all the apps, but I know DEFCON and Safari crash. This started with no warning, about, 6 boot sessions after the Leopard install. Any thoughts on what's wrong, how to fix it, or if I should sell it and move on?

Thank you for reading!
 
I suggest zapping the PRAM as you recently swapped the ram and that could be causing the problem. :apple: + opt + p + r
 
I tried that, and it went to a second "bong", and now it's at the grey Apple screen, spinning away. Could a dead PRAM battery be causing this?

This computer is starting to drive me crazy. I'm considering selling it and buying a Power Mac G5.
 
Anyone? Any ideas why resetting the PRAM made it not boot? I don't like sitting on an expensive, heavy brick. Please help!
 
Will it boot off the Leopard disk? If so then try installing the OS to an external drive/thumb drive and seeing if that works. If so then I'd suspect a dying internal hard drive.
 
You got it bad, but there's nothing worse than having these problems with a PC. I would wipe the hard drive, repair it with disk utility and reformat it. Then try reinstalling OS 10. If all fails then I'd guess it to be the Ram. Good Luck.
 
Just a guess here...

This post made me think back a bit to my dual/800. I had a lot of the same problems you are having. I reinstalled ram, zapped, re-seated drives and proceeded to ripe the hair from my head wondering what was wrong. For me it came down to third party pci usb/fw card that was causing all the headache.
The card was bad, and during boot when the os was trying to access my external drives it would hang and not boot, or as in your case give a pathetic bounce when I tried to access an installed program from it.

Just a thought

~Drake
 
I'm going to go pull my card right away. Thank you for the advice, I forgot it was back there!
 
Pulling the PCI USB card did nothing. Is there any way I can get it to boot off of a USB Flash drive?
 
I reinstalled Leopard onto my main boot drive. The main drive is less than a year old, IIRC it's a Western Digital. I still can't run any apps without the app or machine crashing. Another problem I've found is that when I use Finder to get info on a drive, it says capacity, space used, and space on disk are all zero kb. Disk Utility at least gives me the correct formatted capacity, but not space available. Any time I try to copy a file, onto a drive that was erased only minutes ago in D.U., it says there isn't enough space and cancels the copy. This goes for copying files from any drive to any drive, including the external I have hooked up to it. I have a lot of my writing on this machine, and losing it would be a DISASTER.

Now for the concise questions:

1) Why is it still unstable, after 2 reinstalls and various permissions checks?
2) How can I get my data off without losing much of it?
3) Can this machine be saved for a reasonable amount, or should I save up and buy a new one? I'm a student and a writer, so great financial burden isn't something I can deal with, but I may be able to get a job soon and I'll have about 1000$ with which to do things.
4) Any advice on how to continue using my 23 inch Cinema Display if and when this machine dies? Is the DVI -> ADC adapter worth the money?
 
applegeek13 said:
I have a lot of my writing on this machine, and losing it would be a DISASTER.

Now for the concise questions:

2) How can I get my data off without losing much of it?
Click to expand...

The data you want to save is on other hard drives, I presume?

Do you know anyone with a Mac? You could pull the hard drive(s) and use an external hard drive dock, connect it to another Mac and pull the files off.

External hard drive docks run $20-30. Unless you upgraded your hard drives to SATA hard drives, you'll want a hard drive dock that can read IDE drives.

This is just an example, shop around, you should be able to find one cheaper than this...

IDE hard drive dock
 
cocacolakid said:
The data you want to save is on other hard drives, I presume?

Do you know anyone with a Mac? You could pull the hard drive(s) and use an external hard drive dock, connect it to another Mac and pull the files off.

External hard drive docks run $20-30. Unless you upgraded your hard drives to SATA hard drives, you'll want a hard drive dock that can read IDE drives.

This is just an example, shop around, you should be able to find one cheaper than this...

IDE hard drive dock
Click to expand...

That HDD dock is nice and has a lot of features, but if your cheap like I am, this is a third of the price of that hard drive dock.

http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-2-0-SATA-ID...471?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3f06cd21c7
 
i have a CoolMax USB to Sata/Ata/IDE adapter, but I'm not sure how well it works. It seems to corrupt some of my data, and not copy all of it, but that may be a bad hard drive. I'm not sure if it's a driver issue either. I'll look into it. So besides getting my data off, what do I need to do? Should I look for a new machine?

Thanks for the help!
 
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