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K so I just had a scary experience...

I often keep my G5 Powermac running with Sleep mode turned off when I expect to be accessing it regularily from my iBook. A few minutes ago I went to log on to it from the iBook and was given a message that it wasn't responding This led me to walk over to the G5 and wiggle the mouse to get my monitor to activate - when it did all I had was my desktop pic and control of my mouse. Not menu bar, no dock, no nothing else.

Because it was all I could do, I shut the machine down and rebooted manually. On reboot, it froze at the apple screen (with the circular progress icon) and wouldn't go any farther. Frustrated after a two minutes or so, I shut down and rebooted again - with the same result. The second time I decided to see if it would eventually work its way through the boot sequence but after two minutes or so I noticed another problem... the fan(s) in the tower started blowing harder and harder over the course of about a minute and a half to the point where I put my hand behind it and it was like having my hand in front of a hair dryer on 'blow' (no heat coming out). After that I shut it down and haven't tried to reboot again.

I'm going to call apple tomorrow but in the meantime does anyone have a suggestion or idea as to what my problem might be?? My tower is a rev.2 Dual 2 Ghz G5 running os 10.3.9. I have noticed the fan problem one time before when I had gotten home from work but that was months ago and a shutdown and restart solved the problem that time. I've NEVER had a boot problem like this though.

[seanc]

Sounds like a re-install of the OS is in order although try booting from the CD and repairing permissions. Also try the Apple Hardware test.

The fans are deigned to come on full blast when the OS is not booted as the OS controls them.
When the OS is not active they come on full blast to stop things frying as there is no OS to tell them when to turn on and off, quite an ingenious idea!

[OreoCookie]

Use the search feature. There are tons of threads about this.

The machine does this for safety reasons: when it doesn't receive any message from the OS for some time, it prepares for the worst-case scenario and switches all system fans to full blast.

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Thanks for the point in the right direction - I've tracked it to an OS problem for sure. I managed to boot my G5 using my iBook in target mode and am having fun backing up 150 gigs or so before doing a clean install - not necessarily a must but I've managed to bloat my system to the point where I was considering it anyway. Lol.

Cheers.