Powermac G5 Quad Core won't boot a display

[jadden]

Yesterday I was extremly lucky and picked up a Powermac G5 for about 50 bucks, was told there was no OS on the machine, but was in working order otherwise. To my extreme surprise I was pleasantly surprised when I got it home to find it was the quad core model, however, everything went down hill from there.

I attempted to do a simple boot with just a monitor connected (that I know works) as well a wired keyboard. The computer turns on, I get the chime with a red light that breifly shines behind the enclosure and that is it. There is NO video output to the monitor.

Logically my next step was to try the other output on the video card, still nothing. I have reseated the RAM, reset the PRAM, reset the SMU, reseated the video card (GeForce 6600), and tried placing the video card in a different PCIe slot.

I have another powermac G5 but unfortunately it is PCI-X and thus I cannot test the video card to see if that is the problem or if it is a problem with the logic board in the quad core g5.

SO my question for the community: what could be wrong with this machine? Everything else seems to be in working order, I get the chime, I get a fan rev, there is no LED blinking to suggest that the RAM is bad. Any help is oh so greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

 

[jbarley]

What exactly do you mean by "just a simple boot" with no operating system on the machine?

 

[jadden]

Simple boot

I mean, I was attempting to get into the grey start up screen without any peripherals attached to the machine (no USB, Ethernet, etc) , so that I could attempt to boot off a disk to load an OS onto the HD.

 

[Nameci]

I mean, I was attempting to get into the grey start up screen without any peripherals attached to the machine (no USB, Ethernet, etc) , so that I could attempt to boot off a disk to load an OS onto the HD.

My wild guess would be a fried vid card.

Try to clean the slots, be sure that the vid card is on the bottom slot. Be sure also to put the vid card firmly on the slot.

 

[666sheep]

As you have another G5, connect them both with firewire cable, put any HDD in Quad and try to boot it in TDM. If you'll see this HDD on your other G5 desktop, it's the card.
You can also try put in Quad HDD with OS installed with screen sharing set up (minimum 10.4.3, 10.5 would be better) then try to access Quad remotely from other computer. If it will work, it's the card.

You can go shorter way and bake this 6600 in oven like 8800GT.

 

[jadden]

Share Screen

That is what I ended up doing (inserting a drive that I knew worked, booting up and sharing the screen with my macbook), thanks for the advice I ended up picking up another 6600 on ebay for pretty cheap (the quadro was still insanely expensive). Hopefully when it arrives it will plug and play without a hitch.

Thanks!