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PowerMac G4 Won't Boot after Sleep

MagnusVonMagnum

MagnusVonMagnum

macrumors 603
Original poster
I've got a Powermac G4 Digital Audio with dual 533s, 512 Megs of ram and two 40 GB hard drives in it and I recently added an Ultra USB 2.0 PCI card and replaced the Rage 128 video card with a reflashed ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128Meg (well, software says 9800 Pro, but the Ebay ad said 9700). Anyway, all has been working fine for the past couple of weeks. I was just about to order a 2.0 GHz 7448 processor upgrade and some more ram (a Sonnet Sata card is on the way as I speak). I was planning on using the machine as a whole house audio server (using Airport Express and/or AppleTV for various rooms in combination with an iPod Touch set up using remote control to select the music, etc.) along with uses for things like a constantly available internet terminal in my den (I use the PC I'm on now mostly for gaming and game development these days since I prefer the OSX OS every day surfing, email, etc.) and a few other things. I got a 500GB drive ready to go in it as soon as the Sata card gets here (was then going to start moving my CD collection over to the hard drive).

But last night instead of shutting down the computer, I put it into sleep mode (not a huge difference in bootup time versus sleep recovery in the past, IMO), but this was the first time I put the computer to sleep instead of shutting down since I got the USB 2.0 card and new video card for it. I went to work the next day and when I got home, I moved the mouse and I could hear the hard drives spinning up to recover from sleep (in the past I had to touch a key on the keyboard to recover from sleep; moving the mouse didn't have any effect). In any case, the monitor didn't kick on. I've had a bit of trouble lately with this monitor not always kicking on the display (I think the magnetic switch inside is starting to get twonky; turning it off and on again usually gets it going), but pressing one of its front panel switches brought it to life with a no signal display on the screen so it wasn't the monitor. I've heard of Macs having sleep issues before. I've had a few times in the past where it wouldn't 'work' after awaking and I had to do a front panel reset so I hit the reset switch. I got the reboot 'chime' sound, but my monitor STILL wasn't kicking on and I heard zero hard drive activity. Holding down the option key did not bring up the boot menu either.

I've tried fully powering it down, even removing the power cord for a few minutes. The machine spins up the hard drives and just sits there doing nothing after the chime sound. I guess I'm glad I didn't order the CPU or memory upgrades last night....

I've looked and looked for something similar on the Google search engines and I did find a few reports of what sounded like the same thing, but no one replied to their posts at all and some were 2+ years old. I guess I can try putting the old video card back in to see if that has anything to do with it. Otherwise, do I have any options to try out? Is there a hard nvram reset switch or something on the motherboard I could try? My mouse lights up, but the Logitech keyboard shows no signs of life (caps lock key doesn't even turn on the corresponding light on the keyboard). I've already tried using the original USB ports on the computer. No difference there either.

Given the whole sleep scenerio, it just seems like that HAS to have something to do with the problem, but I can't imagine what. It ought to reset on a hard reset, after all. I was running Tiger at the time it happened (I do have Leopard on the 2nd drive, but it's noticeably slower than Tiger at the moment; I figured the extra ram and CPU upgrades would change all that).

Overall, this REALLY sucks.

Regards,
MVM
 
I found the motherboard nvram switch (heck, I removed the battery too) and they had no impact. But after I removed the Radeon 9700 and put the old Rage 128 back in, it booted right up.... I'll now try putting the Radeon back in and see what happens.

But is there something that sleep mode could have done to the card itself? I realize it's a flashed PC card, but it was working perfectly up until now.
 
I see the Mac community is REALLY helpful with hardware problems. It's kind of ironic given how you all like to tell PC owners how fabulous the Mac experience is. Everything "just works"...until it doesn't. Then it's time to buy a new one i guess since people seem to know little to nothing about hardware issues. I should have bought a 2nd PC instead.... At least then I wouldn't have to order reflashed cards from ebay because you don't get ripped a new one just to order a 3+ year old graphics card for you computer. It SHOULD cost $40 (same card, just a different bios). Some people want $150+ for a reflashed. New ones are $250+. For an OLD card. Might as well buy a new Mac alright. Oh wait. It won't have a decent card in it either unless it's a $2300+ Mac Pro.

Meanwhile, I might as well throw this ATI 9700 in the trash since shipping it back to Hong Kong will cost me more than buying a used 7500 and that's assuming the guy will even take it back.
 
Hey,

I am having troubles with my G4 as well. Someone recently donated it to me, and the first time I booted up my monitor worked. When my computer went into sleep mode, so did my monitor. Now the monitor says no signal. I have tried everything. plugging in the monitor after the computer is fully booted, keeping power away, but keeping the video cord connected until it is fully booted. Still I have no luck.

Wish I could help your situation. I am writing because I have posted this problem in another thread and really got no response, so perhaps the G4's tech support has diminished almost completely.

Did you ever get yours fixed? I am really hoping I can find a solution to my problem as I would love to turn this computer into a server; at least a server for my house, but I would love to make a server for my emails and websites.
 
MagnusVonMagnum said:
I see the Mac community is REALLY helpful with hardware problems. It's kind of ironic given how you all like to tell PC owners how fabulous the Mac experience is. Everything "just works"...until it doesn't. Then it's time to buy a new one i guess since people seem to know little to nothing about hardware issues. I should have bought a 2nd PC instead.... At least then I wouldn't have to order reflashed cards from ebay because you don't get ripped a new one just to order a 3+ year old graphics card for you computer. It SHOULD cost $40 (same card, just a different bios). Some people want $150+ for a reflashed. New ones are $250+. For an OLD card. Might as well buy a new Mac alright. Oh wait. It won't have a decent card in it either unless it's a $2300+ Mac Pro.

Meanwhile, I might as well throw this ATI 9700 in the trash since shipping it back to Hong Kong will cost me more than buying a used 7500 and that's assuming the guy will even take it back.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you have a bad video card. Your "Mac experience" rant doesn't really ring true considering that the card has nothing to do with Apple.
 
No, I haven't gotten it fixed. I sent the card back to the guy that flashes them in Hong Kong and he sent me another card. I just tried putting it in and it does the same thing. It won't boot. It won't even give a signal on the monitor.

Since the first card, I've upgraded the processor to a 1.8GHz 7448 and the ram from 512Megs to 1.5GB of low latency ram and added a USB 2.0 card and a Sonnet SATA controller and two 500Gig hard drives (using it as part of a whole house audio system with a large music collection dumped via iTunes and backed up on the 2nd drive). The only 'slow' part of the system left is the video card. The Rage 128 works fine, but it's a drag if I try to run Leopard (user interface test rating of almost 100 in Tiger but only 11 in Leopard so I figure the lack of Rage 128 support or usefulness in Leopard is probably the only thing keeping me from using it instead of Tiger, which I have on a different partition.

Unless the guy sent me back the same video card (in an attempt to make it look like he TRIED to do good, but only forfeited S&H instead of a 2nd card while maintaining his high satisfaction rating), I can only conclude one of two things. Either the graphics card slot is 'bad' (doesn't make a lot of sense since it worked for a week + until I used "sleep" instead of shut-down and there are no moving parts involved there) OR the sleep mode did something to the open-firmware settings in regards to that specific video card that is still fuxored. I don't know enough about Apple's firmware to even gander a guess if that's possible or not. I mean the Rage 128 works so it'd have to be model specific or something AND it would have had to survive both a PMU reset (on motherboard) and the application of Newer Tech's firmware updates so that the 7448 CPU would work. I'd say it's at least "plausible" in the sense that I never specifically went into Open Firmware and reset the NVRam after any of that (I couldn't get to it with the old card in and assumed since the Rage 128 worked that it was a bad video card).

However, I did remove the battery from the motherboard and then put it back at one point and I'm pretty sure THAT does reset the NVram so like I said, it seems pretty unlikely that sleep mode could have screwed something up specific to one particular video card and make it refuse to boot while another video card boots just fine. But again, it also seems unlikely that if I had a bad video slot that the Rage 128 card would work just fine (I'm typing with it in here right now on the same machine). And if I had a bad slot, why did it work just fine for entire week up until I used 'sleep' mode instead of just shutting the machine down??? Yet if that sleep mode screwed the video card up, why isn't the new one here working??? (unless of course it is the same card; I should have written down the serial number on it to be sure, but too late now).

The only other thing I can try is to order some OTHER model card and see if it works ok or not. I'm thinking something cheap like a reflashed Radeon 7500 or something (around $40) just to see if the AGP slot works ok on an actual 3D card instead of just that Rage 128 piece of junk.
 
MagnusVonMagnum said:
No, I haven't gotten it fixed. I sent the card back to the guy that flashes them in Hong Kong and he sent me another card. I just tried putting it in and it does the same thing. It won't boot. It won't even give a signal on the monitor.

Since the first card, I've upgraded the processor to a 1.8GHz 7448 and the ram from 512Megs to 1.5GB of low latency ram and added a USB 2.0 card and a Sonnet SATA controller and two 500Gig hard drives (using it as part of a whole house audio system with a large music collection dumped via iTunes and backed up on the 2nd drive). The only 'slow' part of the system left is the video card. The Rage 128 works fine, but it's a drag if I try to run Leopard (user interface test rating of almost 100 in Tiger but only 11 in Leopard so I figure the lack of Rage 128 support or usefulness in Leopard is probably the only thing keeping me from using it instead of Tiger, which I have on a different partition.

Unless the guy sent me back the same video card (in an attempt to make it look like he TRIED to do good, but only forfeited S&H instead of a 2nd card while maintaining his high satisfaction rating), I can only conclude one of two things. Either the graphics card slot is 'bad' (doesn't make a lot of sense since it worked for a week + until I used "sleep" instead of shut-down and there are no moving parts involved there) OR the sleep mode did something to the open-firmware settings in regards to that specific video card that is still fuxored. I don't know enough about Apple's firmware to even gander a guess if that's possible or not. I mean the Rage 128 works so it'd have to be model specific or something AND it would have had to survive both a PMU reset (on motherboard) and the application of Newer Tech's firmware updates so that the 7448 CPU would work. I'd say it's at least "plausible" in the sense that I never specifically went into Open Firmware and reset the NVRam after any of that (I couldn't get to it with the old card in and assumed since the Rage 128 worked that it was a bad video card).

However, I did remove the battery from the motherboard and then put it back at one point and I'm pretty sure THAT does reset the NVram so like I said, it seems pretty unlikely that sleep mode could have screwed something up specific to one particular video card and make it refuse to boot while another video card boots just fine. But again, it also seems unlikely that if I had a bad video slot that the Rage 128 card would work just fine (I'm typing with it in here right now on the same machine). And if I had a bad slot, why did it work just fine for entire week up until I used 'sleep' mode instead of just shutting the machine down??? Yet if that sleep mode screwed the video card up, why isn't the new one here working??? (unless of course it is the same card; I should have written down the serial number on it to be sure, but too late now).

The only other thing I can try is to order some OTHER model card and see if it works ok or not. I'm thinking something cheap like a reflashed Radeon 7500 or something (around $40) just to see if the AGP slot works ok on an actual 3D card instead of just that Rage 128 piece of junk.
Click to expand...

I think your problem is the video card (again). I have an aging 2002 Quicksilver with an ATI sourced Mac version of the 9800 Pro, which accommodates sleep just fine.
 
Not everyone is an expert at reflashing video cards (the main reason ANYONE would buy a reflashed card instead of doing it themselves...duh).

The last time I even attempted to reflash a card (a Sata card to work in a Mac that doesn't normally work with one), WindowsXP had a freaking cow about me changing my hardware configuration (no matter how temporarily) and it's on its last register before I have to beg M$ to let me reregister it again so I wouldn't even think about it. Besides, if you don't know what you're doing and can't find any good information on how to do it, you'll likely do little more than brick your video card.
 
Blogger said:
I think your problem is the video card (again). I have an aging 2002 Quicksilver with an ATI sourced Mac version of the 9800 Pro, which accommodates sleep just fine.
Click to expand...

Two bad video cards in a row, eh? That seems...unlikely (unless of course it is the same card sent back to me and the seller is dishonest).
 
I found a web page article ( http://xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/9600_mac_pc_edition.html ) that documents a known issue with the ATI 9600 Pro from working on certain PowerMacs, including the Digital Audio model. I also found another reference that stated that a 9700 Pro only works with the MDD model. I can't help but wonder if there isn't some connection between the 9600 Pro and 9700 Pro which precludes its use on my system (which is a Digital Audio model), although it's odd that it worked for a week. The seller swears the 2nd card he sent is new/different unit and said he's willing to refund all my money including all shipping charges if I agree to remove negative feedback from ebay (itself a pain to do). The article does say the 9800 Pro doesn't have this issue. When the 9700 Pro was working, it was showing up as a 9800 Pro in the System Profiler.

I tried cleaning the heck out of the contacts on the 9700 Pro last night and reseating it over a dozen times (one DA user said that eventually got it working on his), but it still didn't work so I guess the only way to know for sure is to order a 9800 Pro or get an Nvidia card. Apparently the issue has something to do with the line that controls the AGP bus speed doesn't get the signal to go to 66MHz and so it drops to 33MHz which the video card cannot function at. I could even tell that the Mac fully booted (my whole house audio server started working), even though I had no display so whatever is going on, it appears to at least fool the Mac into believing the display is working or it wouldn't boot up OSX.

Another odd thing is that I finally tried resetting the PMU which also clears NVRam. According to Newer Technology instruction booklet I have here for the 7448 1.8GHz G4 procesor upgrade I have, I should have had to re-load the firmware patches in order to even boot OSX, but I'm typing from it right now so either the patches aren't necessary or the PMU does NOT actually fully reset NvRam and open firmware (I do know the reset did do something because my date/time got reset). I still wonder about that initial sleep procedure and if it might have changed a setting in open firmware somehow that prevents the card from turning on. I know people have said the 9800 Pro works fine with sleep mode, but this is a 9700 Pro and it has a different VMU.
 
MagnusVonMagnum said:
I found a web page article ( http://xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/9600_mac_pc_edition.html ) that documents a known issue with the ATI 9600 Pro from working on certain PowerMacs, including the Digital Audio model. I also found another reference that stated that a 9700 Pro only works with the MDD model. I can't help but wonder if there isn't some connection between the 9600 Pro and 9700 Pro which precludes its use on my system (which is a Digital Audio model), although it's odd that it worked for a week. The seller swears the 2nd card he sent is new/different unit and said he's willing to refund all my money including all shipping charges if I agree to remove negative feedback from ebay (itself a pain to do). The article does say the 9800 Pro doesn't have this issue. When the 9700 Pro was working, it was showing up as a 9800 Pro in the System Profiler.

I tried cleaning the heck out of the contacts on the 9700 Pro last night and reseating it over a dozen times (one DA user said that eventually got it working on his), but it still didn't work so I guess the only way to know for sure is to order a 9800 Pro or get an Nvidia card. Apparently the issue has something to do with the line that controls the AGP bus speed doesn't get the signal to go to 66MHz and so it drops to 33MHz which the video card cannot function at. I could even tell that the Mac fully booted (my whole house audio server started working), even though I had no display so whatever is going on, it appears to at least fool the Mac into believing the display is working or it wouldn't boot up OSX.

Another odd thing is that I finally tried resetting the PMU which also clears NVRam. According to Newer Technology instruction booklet I have here for the 7448 1.8GHz G4 procesor upgrade I have, I should have had to re-load the firmware patches in order to even boot OSX, but I'm typing from it right now so either the patches aren't necessary or the PMU does NOT actually fully reset NvRam and open firmware (I do know the reset did do something because my date/time got reset). I still wonder about that initial sleep procedure and if it might have changed a setting in open firmware somehow that prevents the card from turning on. I know people have said the 9800 Pro works fine with sleep mode, but this is a 9700 Pro and it has a different VMU.
Click to expand...

I once heard a rumor, and the guy could have been lying off his ass, but he said: What might work is replacing the little battery inside.

I don't know if this is true or not or even if there is a little batter (watch battery like) on the computer, but if there is I am going to try that because I had my IT department at my school take a look at it and they couldn't fix it.
 
I have a 1.25 ghz 2003 MDD since it was new. Never a problem with any of my macs since 1984. However I put this machine to sleep and it came back on, put it back to sleep and hasn't booted properly since then. The entire Logic Board does not boot up, you get the chime, drives and fans spool up but video and and native USB do not power up. Every now and then it boots up such as now and will restart once booted. Removed 9800 ProVC, pushed rest button on LB, moved memory around, reseated processor no change. Get this, while reseating Videocard I forgot to disconnect the powercord, after moving the card slightly the machine booted! albeit incompletely. How the heck does a shutdown Mac boot chime, drives and fans just by slightly moving Video Card? Thanks

Does this sound like a Logic/Motherboard issue?
 
Check power requirements

I had some problems with a flashed Radeon 9700 Pro in an AGP Graphics G4/450 and a Gigabit Ethernet G4/450 DP because the card wasn't getting enough power. Those 2 G4 models don't provide enough without having problems arise. The Gigabit worked okay for a few days, then games started sputtering and there were loud clicking noises coming from the inside of the case.

I installed the 9700 in a Quicksilver 733, which has a much bigger power supply, and haven't had any similar problems.
You could check the power supply as a possible problem.

I do have one problem though, in that when the 9700 is installed, the Quicksilver does not shut down either from the menu or via scheduled shutdown. No problems waking from sleep. I have to use the power button on the front of the case to shut down: i.e., press it and hold for about 5 seconds.
I have OS 10.4.11 installed, along with ATIccelerator II (but I haven't overclocked it).
 
All I know is the 9700 won't boot in this Digital Audio (see 9600 related comments above and/or possible defect from dishonest seller) but I just bought a flashed 9800 Pro (a new guy was selling them for $99 whereas AppleManiax and others want a ridiculous $170 and up for a $50 flashed card, which is over 3x what they're paying for the cards just to flash it for you). Anyway, the card was recognized and booted right up and has been working fine thus far in the same Digital Audio PowerMac.
 
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