[Richard Clark]

G4/450
9.2.2
256 MB RAM
80 GB HD (Maxtor - Newly Installed)

This machine started acting really weird on Tuesday after a restart. The cursor would turn into the black and white beach ball twice, then after about three minutes the cusor would turn into a little black ball bombe with a fuse.

The hard drive was put into it's sister machine and all files copied off of it after trying alot of different things (NUM, Disk First Aid, Clean System Install). The files (10.6 GB) transferred fine to it's sister station. The HD was initialized and then everything was copied back over. Didn't work.

From another thread on here it looked like it could be the hard drive. So a Maxtor 120 GB HD was purchased, set up. There was a DLT drive that had everything backed up, so I did a restore. When starting up the machines the Firewire cables can not be hooked up. Otherwise it won't get past the 15 - 20 % area on the progress bar. If Firewire is not hooked up it will start up fine.

The PRAM has been zapped alot.
The Cuda switch has also been tried four times.

The firewire devices is a QUE CD-R drive and a UMAX Powerlook 1100 scanner. I've turned off both devices but still hooked up and the machine won't fully boot.

Apple System Profiler won't show them if hooking up after the it has successfully started. I thought maybe it might be the firmware needed to be re-installed (4.2.8f1) but it says that it's current.

This machine up until a couple days ago could scan and burn without any problem.

---------------------------------------

Now it's sister machine isn't hooking up to firewire devices and hasn't been able to from what I've been told. I'm consulting for a friend. This second machine has 10.1 installed on it and even in X it can't see the CD burner that is hooked up to it.

For both machines I've:

re-installed the Firewire drivers
tried different cables
tried different port

I've been reading in other threads that a chip for the firewire may have fried. How do you determine that? Will the Apple Hardware Diagnostic CD help in this? I haven't tried that yet.

This is a very tiny overview of the work that has been done on these machines. It would take a good day to write it all down. The biggest thing is that the machines are running but won't see any Firewire devices. And on the one machine won't start up unless the firewire cables are pulled.

Any help on this would be great!

Thanks in advance.

[D'Espice]

As far as I can see you have not tried to reinstall the OS, is that right? You might wanna give that a shot

[Richard Clark]

The OS has been clean installed on the one machine that has the new hard drive. It also has run a restored OS from the DLT back-up. I haven't tried a clean install on the second machine.

[zac4mac]

Probably not much help, but this sounds similar to what happened to my friend's dual 450. Fortunately, he had AppleCare and they replaced both the power supply and the motherboard. All is well now.
The "after a restart" timing is the same failure mode I just had with my dual 500's(gigE) power supply last month.(actually, the p/s blew up as the Mac was shutting down)
If it's still under warranty, I'd contact Apple about replacement.