Hi there, I've recently transplanted a G4 system into a PC case (not too much fun by the way..)
I've got everything assembled, screwed down, and attached. When it boots, it gives me the regular grey screen with the apple and the swirly at the bottom...after a few seconds, the screen shows the same screen (swirly still moving) with white garbage across it in three rows...
I can't figure out what is wrong. I double-checked all the connections and everything looks good (no gouges on the mobo or video card or anything else)
I miss my G4 (I'm using my MBP right now)...
Hey,
Does it chime? If it does, then it's probably a video problem. If it doesn't that's a different kettle of fish. Any hard drive activity? We need details, man, details.
William
www.williamahearn.com
Hm... Well, since the last time I used it, it had no speakers and volume off...no chime. I've got plenty of HDD activity until it spins down (around 10-20 minutes after the gray apple screen). The case fan is still on, as well as the little swirly at the bottom half of the screen (I thought it hung, but i can still turn the caps lock on/off...so I'm not sure...)
It's only done this since I've relocated it to my dorm from home (about a 20 minute travel). When I got it here (my dorm) and hooked it up, initially i could press the power button, the light would come on then fade when I let go of the power button. No boot. I cracked open the case and found the CPU was loose from the mobo. I reattached it and it's secure. I just pray that I didn't frag the processor....
I decided to reset the PRAM just for kicks and giggles, it chimes now but I've still got garbled video
I'll see if I can't dig up another AGP ATI Mac card to test with.
What else could cause this? If the CPU were bad, the Mac wouldn't even boot, right?
It sounds to me like two things are going on. You've got bad video, meaning either a bad video card or the card's not seating right. You probably had to do some careful adjusting to get the mobo's pci slots aligned and you may have damaged the video slot in the process, or the contacts on the video card.
Have you tried holding the shift key down at startup to go into Safe Boot? The startup stall may simply be a software conflict. Sometimes even booting through Safe mode solves the problem for me. If you get to your desktop with Safe mode, do all the important things like check date and time, establish the startup disk, run Repair Permissions in Disk Utility.
Out of curiosity, does the video garbage look like this?:
http://www.applefritter.com/node/7887
Don't mind the ham. I told her to do that, and she was supposed to be in bed already.
Wow, yeah the garbage is *just* like that...
And the safe start didn't work...It just continues on.
I reseated the card just for extra measure, still no good.
Do you have an install disk and another hard drive you could install a system onto and see how it goes? Have you tried booting from a CD or DVD? I keep a CD of a burned complete OS 9 around for these kinds of situations, or you could run disk utility from a X install disk.
You're not using an ATA PCI controller card are you? Remove any other PCI cards. Which model of G4 is this?
Also, did you switch to the PC's ATA cable, which probably would be a Cable Select cable, so that your hard drive jumper would need to be set to CS and the drive would have to be connected at the cable's end connector? The same may be the situation with the optical drive, or maybe in reverse, such as, did you switch to the PC's optical (CD, DVD) drive which may be set to CS and you're using two drives, one set to CS and one set to master, or some such misconbobulation? (How you spell dat? We have a better word here. You say, da bugga all hemojang)
I believe the way it works is, if you get to the apple, then BootX was successful, and if you get to the sprocket (your "swirly"), then the mach_kernel has loaded, and then whatever comes next may be corrupted causing your hang, but I may have no clue as to what I'm saying. You are, though, not getting a kernel panic, I assume. Do all kernel panics bring up the frozen black screen "please restart" kernal panic message, or can a hang like this without any message be a kernel panic too?
I'd be very interested to know, if the video garbage is not caused by malfunctioning video hardware, what else in the world could be causing it?
A corrupt HD could do that, or just corrupt kext files for the video card. I would try booting from another HD or a CD.
I'm also curious to know, are you using the G4's power supply, or did you mod a PC PSU?
X Disk:
The last time I tried to boot using an X disk (10.5) It hung up on the hardware, it threw an error about the CPU I believe (I think it's something like 450 MHz).
Also, when I got the box, I got no software with it, although...I do have an OS8 disk....
I'm not using any other cards save for the AGP ATI 128 Rage Pro that came with the Mac.
Model: Sawtooth AGP Video
Cable: I'm using the original OEM Mac Cable, original jumper settings as well (HDD Master on controller one, DVD-Rom Master, ZIP 100 Slave on controller two)
PSU: It's also the original from the mac (something around 350 watts I believe)
I've got an OS 8 Disk floating about somewhere, I may try and reformat the drive from there...but I don't have a copy of Tiger or Panther to put on the G4.
Would 8 recoginze my hardware correctly or should I go find a copy of Panter?
The Sawtooth (first AGP G4) shipped with 8.6 originally, so if that's the version you have it _may_ work. Still, the Sawtooth probably requires a specific version of 8.6, so whatever OS 8 disk you've got is unlikely to work. You'd be safe with any OS 9 version, or any version of X before 10.5.
dan k
OS 8.0 does not work on any Mac after the Beige G3. The B&W's minimum requirement is 8.5. I'm surprised to hear that the Sawtooth shipped with 8.6 since my B&W shipped with 8.6, but looking at it, that was a time when Apple was churning out models on top of each other. They went from the last of the Beige G3's to the B&W, to the Yikes!, and to the Sawtooth in less than a year. Remember that commercial where the guy's driving down the street in his convertible whistling happily and proudly with his brand new B4 (or some number like that) computer, still in its box, in the back seat and then looks up at a billboard and, to his dismay, sees an ad for the B5? That guy was me.
That's good news...kinda
The copy I've got is 8.1. So that's a no-go. I've got a buddy that collects strange mac-related things. I'll see if he doesn't have a copy of Panther floating about.
Tried a verbose boot? Command-V at the chime. That should let you know how far it gets into bootup and maybe even see an error message.
I did the verbose boot and it's scary!
It's definitely hanging. I think it may be due to my harddrive; the load looks good until it tries to start the OS (or access the harddrive) then it says ...
hfs_mountroot failed: 5
htf_boot: networking is not initialized
panic(cpu 0): thread_funnel_switch: network funnel not held
Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
[Garbage]
Kernlel version: 6.1:
then it dumps the debug info
and at the end...
panic: We are hanging here....
So, I guess kernel panics don't always give the nice "please reboot" screen, and that I need to reformat my harddrive?
Oh, that's right. IIRC, I think the "please restart" screen began with Jaguar and the kernel panics in previous OS X's were verbose screens ending with that "panic: we are hanging here."
At the very least I'd boot a spare drive or a CD and try to run some disk tools on it, and hope it's not the drive controller.
Would it be possible to use my MPB as a firewire drive and boot the G3?
Not really. Technically with "Leopard" (not "Tiger") it's supposedly possible to make a disk that'll boot either a PowerPC or an Intel Mac, but it requires playing some cute games with partition tables. The standard GUID partitioning on a MacBook isn't recognized by a PowerPC machine's firmware.
Just pulling ideas out of the air, if you do have Leopard on your MBP you could try bringing up the G4 in target disk mode, formatting the drive (don't forget to use Apple Partition Map format), and cloning your MBP OS over to it. It definitely *won't* work with Tiger as the OS binaries are different, but supposedly with Leopard it *might*. Never tried it, your mileage may vary, blawblawblaw.
--Peace
Okay, I'll try it. And just for clarification, I'd use HFS+?
Yeah. Just in addition to that be sure to hit the "Options" button in the disk utility and make the "Partition Map Scheme" is "Apple Partition Map", not GUID, if it doesn't default to APM.
--Peace
I finally got a copy of 10.3. I used the Disk utility from the disk and formatted the HDD using HFS+. No good...I rebooted and it hung (now with a pretty black screen and 7 different languages telling me so
)
I rebooted (again) in verbose mode, and i got an error close to the first, except the main difference is nfs_mountroot failed: 9 instead of 5...
I think I'll try another harddrive.
It's odd beucase the garbage mysteriously disappeared!
Well, it's just as you thought...it was indeed a bad harddrive.
I yanked the original 20 Gig and dropped a 40 Gig Maxtor now it works beautifully!
Thanks for all your help