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ugh, g5 won't startup, any suggestions?

T

turtlebud

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 17, 2002
590
45
Yesterday, I noticed my G5 was acting a little funny. The time was wrong - it said 6am when i was 11pm or something.

Tonight I tried to boot it up and it basically got stuck on the loading screen w/ the apple and the spinning progress bar. I left it for about 20 minutes and then forced a shut down and tried a couple of things:

1. start up in safe mode (didn't work, still stuck in same screen)
2. reset PRAM (seemed to get further, but then got stuck on blue screen which seemed to alternate between a lighter and darker blue along with the spinning progress bar)
3. reset the NVRAM (didn't work)
4. booted up in target mode and ran disk utility, checking & fixing disk (no errors were found)
5. booted up via Leopard install DVD and ran disk utility, repairing permissions. fixed a couple of things, mainly related to airport (which is odd cause I have it turned off) (didn't work)
6. started in single user mode, ran fsck (got prompt, ran fsck, no errors found, rebooted)
7. removed all peripherals (usb/firewire) only thing left was power, ethernet, keyboard & mouse (I actually did this first)

My next try will be to pull out the RAM in pairs and see if that makes any difference and maybe trying to pull the boot disk out and put it in an external firewire drive to see if it'll boot from there. But I plan to bring it into apple store tomorrow night to see what that can figure out. Still under applecare until next march so I should be okay in that sense, but I don't really like the idea of being without it for however many days it may take to fix it.

Am I missing anything?
 
Hi,

Just to let you know you're not alone....

I had the same issue, but mine is freezing after a while of use.

Did you do all of the following?

To boot into Open Firmware, shut down your Mac, then start it up while holding down the Command, Option, O and F keys. At the prompt, enter the following commands (you may want to write them down on a piece of paper before beginning this process), pressing the return key after each:

reset-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all

After which your Mac will restart.
 
thanks for the reponse.

you know, I tried to boot into open firmware, but couldn't seem to get a prompt. just tried it again this morning and it got stuck in a blank blue screen which seem to alternate between a lighter and darker blue screen, one with a cursor, and the other without a cursor (kind of like the screen is blinking). I'm going to go ahead and let it run for about 10 minutes, but it doesn't seem promising.
 
i think it was a bad drive

seems like the problem might have been that my desk(death)star is dying. I had an old backup of my boot disk that I had when I upgraded from tiger to leopard that I swapped in and everything booted up fine.

i'm going to try and clone my boot drive from my deskstar to an external drive and see if it boots. If it does, then i'll be more sure that the drive is the problem. geez, the drive is only 2 years old and it died. *sigh* but hopefully the good news is that it's not my powermac that's dying. :)
 
Sounds like a harddrive issue to me, except for the part about not getting into the OpenFirmware (OpenBoot if your a solaris man :p) prompt.

Try booting the backup and let us know how that goes. Good luck!
 
On a non related basis, where did you get your 7800 GT? Is that the PCIE edition? I bought one to flash but to rom was too big for the card. Who made yours?

Thanks! :D
 
zmttoxics said:
On a non related basis, where did you get your 7800 GT? Is that the PCIE edition? I bought one to flash but to rom was too big for the card. Who made yours?

Thanks! :D
Click to expand...

My 7800GT was an BTO upgrade when I ordered by G5. I believe it was made my nvidia.
 
so, cloned the drive over to an external firewire drive I had and tried to boot up with it. no luck. same characteristics. so then I tried to boot up the cloned firewire drive on my macbook. i figured if it's a hardware problem with the G5, then the macbook should be able to book that drive just fine. same problem though. so that led me to believe that it's a problem with that particular install of leopard. something must have happened the last time I was working with it that screwed up the system beyond repair.

so i'm on the option 2 (or 3, i've lost count now). I did a clean install and am transferring my settings over to see if I can get a bootable drive. will update with results.
 
so the clean install + migration assistant seems to be working okay so far. i will need to use it a bit more before I have confidence to try it with my original drive. however, I wanted to whether i should consider purchasing/investing in diskwarrior to see if I can repair the original drive. it's not a cheap investment ($100) but i've heard good things about people recovering their dead drives using it.

the main reason i am considering it is i'm just worried that some of my settings aren't going to make it over and inevitably one day when i'm running a program or opening a file that I haven't run in awhile it's not going to work because I did the clean install + migration.
 
okay, so thanks to the link from squirrel, i decided to try diskwarrior first (which didn't work unfortunately), then an archive and install on a cloned copy of the corrupted drive instead of a clean install + migration assistant. i updated the leopard to the most recent version (and all the apps that needed updating) and almost everything seems to be working well. the only exception was aperture which kept crashing upon launch. a reinstall of aperture seemed to fix the problem.

i'm probably going to run it a few more days off this external firewire cloned drive, but i'm hopeful that it'll be fixed.

my question now is this. i still have the original drive which I haven't touched (only cloned it to an external drive). should I

a) do an archive and install on the original drive, the do all the software updates, etc.?
b) clone the external drive which seems to be working to the original drive?

Thanks!
 
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