[macgurus]

Greetings,

I installed a second ide drive into this unit and when i started up she just hung so I pulled out the second drive and attempted to reboot (start) and the unit would not come on. I quickly located the CUDA (now PMU) button near the battery on the mobo and hit it. Nothing. Then I hit it again and tried startup and she powered on.

I notice no video situation (mind you she had video before when she hungup and machine was working flawlessly before i attempted this installation sad smiley ). So I have no video, try restart, nothing.

Unit powers ON, CHIMES, FAN goes on but the mouse never lights up or keyboard and no video (this is key I think but let me know).

I pulled the battery. reset the pmu several times. pulled the video card, reset it, pulled each ram stick out and tried to start with each one...replaced the agp with a pci vid card out of a beige g3 and tried to start..nothing...

removed ide connector cable and tried to boot by DVD/CD

the thing is, no matter what I do...the unit chimes.powers on but never lights up the mouse (which after testing a g3 imac, the normal sequence is power,chime,usb mouse lights up, video comes on).

the mobo has its red led light on near the RAM and it lights up as well

there seems to be ample power

i can figure two possibilities niether of which are good

1.) pulling the cable connector in and out the mobo sustained damage (no visual on this, contraindications are the chime on startup (indicates self test OK) --- the pro's on this line of reasoning are that she seems to hang when initializing the usb ports

2.) resetting the pmu might have caused an issue with the open firmware perhaps, i have left the battery out and power off to see if it helps but no go


the keyboard and mice are known good and were tested on other hardware since the problem began

i am in a rather humid state so i doubt i had any static discharge (florida)

does anyone have any idea what i might be able to do? or am i just looking at a fried mac

also, how thorough is the SELF TEST that gives you the happy mac chime??

i pulled the battery, power cord and let her sit overnight which should clear the pmu/cuda circuit..still no go


in short i have tried everything i can possibly think of...any input/advice would be appreciated....TIA and best regards 2 all.

[reader50]

What are your hardware specs? ie - which model of AGP PowerMac? The original clockspeed of the CPU can almost nail down the model, if you don't actually know the model.

What monitor are you using? All the resetting you did may have reset the resolution to one that your LCD monitor doesn't recognize. A CRT monitor is better at troubleshooting this kind of problem, because it will at least show something if the signal is out of range. A flat panel usually shows nothing at all when it's at an unsupported resolution. So you might be booting up normally, or stalling out with drive corruption, but you couldn't see it.

What were your two HDs jumpered as when you first tried to boot up? That is, right after connecting the 2nd HD. This one could be important, and depends somewhat on which PowerMac G4 you have. If you used Cable Select, then it definitely depends on which PowerMac you have.

My first guess is a jumper combination that hosed the HDs. If this threw off the system files enough to mess up the monitor resolution, it could explain most of your symptoms, except an inability to boot from CD, and why the USB system isn't initializing as usual.

[macgurus]

i have already disco'd the ide cable to the HD's isolating that
as an issue

w/o the ide cable on the HD i should in theory be able to hit C and get to boot off CD/DVD but that doesn't work because it never gets to the USB startup (mouse never lights up)..i also dont' hear it query the HD ever....i think it hangs way before it does anything like this...if USB enables BEFORE video then i'm stuck someplace around USB powerup (which seems likely)

the oddity is that the mobo chimes the happy mac sound, powers up fine through its self test etc...

thanks for the input....

[macgurus]

if the open firmware is hosed is there a way to work on that from another mac perhaps?

i can't think of a way if i cannot get a keyboard/mouse going even

or video for that matter...


is it possible the mobo is actually fried despite the happy mac startup chime?

[reader50]

You still have not told us what your hardware specs are. We can't help very well if we are trying to diagnose a mystery box.

Also, you claim to have disconnected the IDE cable to diagnose it. Is this the cable from the motherboard connector, and did you pull it from the drives / from the motherboard / from both? Or are you running off a PCI ATA card? And yes, we still need to know what the HDs were jumpered at when the problem began.

Unplug all USB connections and try to boot normally from the front power button. The video should at least come up and show something, even if the HD is hosed. If the HD is disconnected, the system ought to search for and find the CD to boot from.

Is the CD / DVD drive an upgrade, or the OEM drive? ie - did you ever confirm that you can boot from this drive before now? We could use this spec too. I'm having to guess blind.

Hardware specs, please. And OSX version. Peripherals too. Like if you are running through a USB hub. Powered or unpowered.

[macgurus]

agp g4 sawtooth 400mhz tower, all stock except vid card

ide disco'd from mb

she never gets to cd/dvd doesn't try to look, no video out, no flashing video ???? looking for drives or anything... i could previously boot from dvd/cd yes

panther running


direct connection port 1 or 2 for keyboard and mouse, mouse is direct to port, no power condition


in short we have power, lights up,happy mac chime, dvd lights, zip lights momentarily,(as they should on power up), front power light stays on, mobo red light comes on, USB mouse light does NOT come on, keyboard never gets powered....if a HD is plugged in it powers up fine, fan comes on fine

so the mobo does self test, chimes and then just stops after that
i believe the firmware toasted itself somehow and just crashes
thats my analysis at this point
using this firmware approach negates me being able to GET to firmware if it doesn't even enable Video and USB banks...

another chance is that the mobo self test isn't too extensive beyond memory/cpu and a few other things and that leaves an isolated mobo issue someplace

what doyou think? TIA

[reader50]

If you have a voltmeter handy, try checking the voltage of the battery with the computer unplugged. It should be above 3v since it is a nominal 3.6 volts. A dead battery is known to cause all sorts of problems, including boot failure and no video on various Mac models.

What I'm thinking of. If you are in the habit of sleeping your Mac, or leaving it on 24/7, this may be the first time in many months that it's been completely shut down. Plenty of time for the battery to finish going dead, without your having a chance to notice it. All the Sawtooth models are old enough to need new batteries.

If this were the case, then the fact that you made hardware changes was simply coincidence. The system would have given these problems after the next shutdown, regardless of what service was done. And sent you on any number of wild goose chases, depending on whatever service happened to be done most recently.

If it is the battery, you can get a replacement fairly cheap from Radio Shack. #23-026

Note: this model doesn't support Cable Select. The drives needed to be jumpered Master and Slave. The OEM drive came from the factory jumpered as Single. If the drives were not rejumpered as M + S before bootup, there is a fair chance of corruption to the original drive. There's some other problem (hopefully the battery), but you could still need to do some disk repair before everything works reliably again.