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| I need help with setting up a G4. |
Posted by: PlaceboKoyote on 2022-05-19 04:28:57
So,
I have now two Powermac G4 AGPs,
I have a harddrive with Tiger and OS9.2.2 installed and after fiddling around... Both wont Boot. At all.
The first from which i took the Hard drive and the GPU was a bit glitchy for a while and was buggy booting the OS, it only booted one time, couldnt reboot without unplugging the Power cable, the second one i got because i couldnt flash the Firmware to accept a sonnet card.
But the second one has the same issue: since about a week, they don't Boot osx, they only Show the Apple Logo forever.
Booting from any osx Boot DVD or cd (10.2-10.4) doesn't work. It Shows the Apple logo, the loadibg circle and then the screen goes black, even though you hear the disc drive working etc.
Trying to Boot os9 has the same Result: it Shows the grey Logo and the screen goes Black.
Also it can't be the Hard Disk because booting from CD doesn't work on both and ot can't be the GPU, because it Shows like the bootlader and the Apple Logo.
And they dont share more components. Also the second one doesn't act buggy a side from it not booting. |
Posted by: PlaceboKoyote on 2022-05-19 04:39:58
Could it be the GPU that creates the issue? |
Posted by: CircuitBored on 2022-05-19 04:46:27
It could be GPU trouble, which card do you have?
It could well be an issue with your RAM. Not only do the sticks fail, the slots can be problematic too. How many sticks do you have installed and of what size?
I'd start by removing your RAM one stick at a time to see if that makes a difference. |
Posted by: PlaceboKoyote on 2022-05-19 04:49:55
It could be GPU trouble, which card do you have?
It could well be an issue with your RAM. Not only do the sticks fail, the slots can be problematic too. How many sticks do you have installed and of what size?
I'd start by removing your RAM one stick at a time to see if that makes a difference. So i tried with a 400MHz G4 in thr first one and a 450mhz one aswell as a 1.4GHz Encore St card in the second one. The sonnet card loads the Black screen faster ^^
I swapped multiple ram Modules in the first one. In the second one i just left thr 512mb it came with.
But i have about 12 Modules i could swap around. Altough probably not all of them can't be broken
Oh Sorry you meant GPU...
The Rage128pro with a fan from the first one. No other GPU
Just ordered a used geforce 2 mx for a few bucks since having a GPU for each Computer makes sense anyways |
Posted by: ArmorAlley on 2022-05-19 06:02:18
Do you have a Mac OS 9 boot CD? If so, can you boot it with that? |
Posted by: PlaceboKoyote on 2022-05-19 06:04:26
Do you have a Mac OS 9 boot CD? If so, can you boot it with that? Nope. Doesn't work on both.
Shows agray screen and then after a second black |
Posted by: macuserman on 2022-05-19 06:20:54
The first from which i took the Hard drive and the GPU was a bit glitchy for a while and was buggy booting the OS, it only booted one time, couldnt reboot without unplugging the Power cable, the second one i got because i couldnt flash the Firmware to accept a sonnet card. These don't happen to be MDD machines do they? I ask because you mentioned having to plug and replug the power cord? If so the PSU is likely a culprit here. |
Posted by: PlaceboKoyote on 2022-05-19 07:02:53
These don't happen to be MDD machines do they? I ask because you mentioned having to plug and replug the power cord? If so the PSU is likely a culprit here. The powerplug thing only occurs on the first one. The second one has a better looking psu (it looks higher quality but i dunno, i am mostly dealing with modern Hardware besides the G4s).
Nope, they are both sawtooth AGP models |
Posted by: ArmorAlley on 2022-05-19 07:31:36
Start the machine with as few things in as possible: one stick of RAM only, unplug the IDE-cable for the hard-drives, remove all PCI cards, remove all USB & Firewire cables but the keyboard & mouse. If you have an AirPort card in, remove it. Try again with one of the boot CDs.
If you have 4 sticks of RAM, you may have to try 4 times, each with one stick of RAM.
You need to find known good items so that you can rule them out.
Reset your PRAM settings (command-option-P-R) and see if you can boot to 640x480 at 256 colours.
Questions for the others:
1. Is the PRAM battery necessary? I don't think it is but my knowledge of Sawtooth AGPs is generic to G4s.
2. Open Firmware commands: is anyone here fluent in OF and be able the OP? |
Posted by: PlaceboKoyote on 2022-05-19 07:34:03
I already tried restting everything, PRAM battery is not necessary, i know, but it didn't made a difference.
No my knowledge about open Firmware is really limited.
But i will try the ram swapping again in the evening
Also thanks a lot to everyone |
Posted by: CircuitBored on 2022-05-19 10:15:03
Start the machine with as few things in as possible: one stick of RAM only, unplug the IDE-cable for the hard-drives, remove all PCI cards, remove all USB & Firewire cables but the keyboard & mouse. If you have an AirPort card in, remove it. Try again with one of the boot CDs.
If you have 4 sticks of RAM, you may have to try 4 times, each with one stick of RAM.
You need to find known good items so that you can rule them out.
Reset your PRAM settings (command-option-P-R) and see if you can boot to 640x480 at 256 colours.
Questions for the others:
1. Is the PRAM battery necessary? I don't think it is but my knowledge of Sawtooth AGPs is generic to G4s.
2. Open Firmware commands: is anyone here fluent in OF and be able the OP?
This is a good process. I can confirm that PRAM batteries are ot necessary.
As far as Open Firmware is concerned: establishing that you can actually boot into it is also a good stepping stone. If OF won't work then the logic board is likely in pretty serious trouble.
@PlaceboKoyote you mentioned that you have been swapping CPUs around. I recommend that you grab a magnifying glass and thoroughly inspect the CPU sockets. Those sockets are a lot more fragile than people realise and you can easily bend the pins just by reinserting the CPU at a slight angle. Be sure to check the connectors on both the CPU and logic board.
Spray your RAM and AGP slots with contact cleaner. These machines are more than twenty years old and their sockets simply aren't very reliable any more. This is a nearly universal issue with old electronics, in my experience. |
Posted by: PlaceboKoyote on 2022-05-24 14:30:28
This is a good process. I can confirm that PRAM batteries are ot necessary.
As far as Open Firmware is concerned: establishing that you can actually boot into it is also a good stepping stone. If OF won't work then the logic board is likely in pretty serious trouble.
@PlaceboKoyote you mentioned that you have been swapping CPUs around. I recommend that you grab a magnifying glass and thoroughly inspect the CPU sockets. Those sockets are a lot more fragile than people realise and you can easily bend the pins just by reinserting the CPU at a slight angle. Be sure to check the connectors on both the CPU and logic board.
Spray your RAM and AGP slots with contact cleaner. These machines are more than twenty years old and their sockets simply aren't very reliable any more. This is a nearly universal issue with old electronics, in my experience. So the Geforce 2MX i ordered (couldnt find another GPU for it for a reasonable price, my first ever NVIDIA card lol) arrived today and now the second G4 i got works perfectly fine.
It was really the GPU that couldnt load graphics mode, just like a Text mode for open Firmware or the boot picker but as soon as anything using the aqua theme or Animations or whatever the System crashed. |
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