[grovberg]

Alright, here's the chain of events. We got two new Dual 1.8 G5s at work to go into our video editing lab. I booted both up just to make sure everything was running and having just made a new lab image, I then booted to a CD and used Apple Software Restore to image the machines. The image was built on a G4, but since it had the most current version of OS X, I didn't think it would be a big deal. Boy was I wrong. Welcome to crash city. Population....me. I had application and system level crashing around every twenty minutes or so.

Okay, no big deal I think. I'll just use the restore CD to build an all new shiny G5 specfic image. So I pop the restore CD into G5 number 1 and everything works great. I resintall all the apps and everything works just fine now. Even got my ASR image without a hitch. However G5 number 2 (which was locking up/kernal panic-ing about every 5 minutes) will not boot to a CD at all.

Here's the rundown on G5 #2's symptoms.
-Just hitting the power button causes the fans to come on and the CD to spin. That's all. No video, no loading, no beeps. I don't even get the start-up "bong". I also can not boot to Open Firmware.

-Unplugging and replugging the power within about 5 minutes does not change anything.

-Unplugging and leaving it for an hour or so before replugging it in will let me boot to Open Firmware. Once there I tried reset-nvram, set-defaults and reset-all (which is the extent of my open firmware knowledge). At the resulting restart, I can boot to the CD, but before I can get very far into the installer or the frustratingly slow disc utility to load, I get a kernel panic (which includes both the old school crazy "waiting for remote debugger" text AND the nice new "Please restart your machine" text). At this point we are back to square one where the power button only starts up the fan.

Sooooo, any thoughts guys? Do you think this is a hardware failure? I generally consider myself pretty capable with fixing problems, but I am COMPLETELY clueless on this one.

Thanks for any advice you might have.
-Grover

[Leonard]

Sounds like it may be a hardware problem and it sounds like you won't be able to run the hardware test CD. You could try to see that everything is seated properly - the RAM, the video card, hit the CUDA reset button. You might also want to try switching the RAM from machine #1 with machine #2 and see if that fixes machine #2. If that fixes it, it means it's the RAM. I assumed you didn't add any 3rd party RAM to the machine. IF you did you could try taking that out. Any external peripherals attached besides the standard mouse and keyboard? Remove these if they are attached.

[rsgunther]

Take the hard drive out of #2, put in #1.. then clone the #1 drive to #2... then try to boot #2. If it still doesn't boot, then it is a hardware issue or something in the software you attempted messed up firmware or something on the hardware.

[chris v]

It really sounds like RAM to me. I had a RAM slot go bad on a motherboard here a couple years ago, and that's exactly the way it behaved. Pull chips, and try them in other slots. (If you've got one bad slot on your motherboard, the machine should run as long as it's empty) Swap RAM from the other box, and that'll prove pretty quick if it's the ram chips themselves.

CV