[Todd Madson]

I'm typing this from my work laptop since I came home from a day of work to find my
G5 inoperative.

No lights, no sound, no power, nothing. The machine was cold so it's been
"off" for hours, I knew something was funny when my website stopped responding
at some point during the day when I was off-site.

So far:

(1) tested power source - verified producing 110vac
(2) disconnected power cable from G5
(3) removed fans and verified ram was seated correctly
(4) verified no liquid leaking from the unit
(5) replaced fans, replaced viewing shield, replaced metal side panel and ac.
(6) pressing the power button produces no reaction in the machine.
(7) my powered external usb drives on the same circuit are running
(8) the machine is cool to the touch so it hasn't been on for a few hours I guess.

My guess: power supply?

Anyone else run into this?

[chris v]

From the G5 service manual:

Many system problems can be resolved by resetting the PMU chip. When you have a
computer that fails to power up, follow this procedure before replacing any modules:
1. Disconnect the power cord and check the battery in the battery holder. The battery
should read 3.3 to 3.7 volts. If the battery is bad, replace it, wait ten seconds, and then
proceed to step 2. If the battery is good, go directly to step 2.
2. Press the PMU reset button once and then proceed to step 3. Do not press the PMU
reset button a second time because it could crash the PMU chip.
3. Wait ten seconds before connecting the power cord and powering on the computer. If
the computer does not power on, there is something else wrong with it; refer to the
“System” section of “Symptom Charts” in this chapter.
Note: The above procedure resets the computer’s PRAM. After resetting the PMU, be
sure to reset the time, date, and other system parameter settings.

The button is right below the bottom bank of RAM.

Edit: That's from the Rev. A manual -- not sure exactly if the button's still in the same place on the 2.5's.

[Todd Madson]

Tried. No lights, no power, no sound.

[Big Mac]

When you said dead in the water, I thought that may have had a double meaning - dead in the water figuratively speaking and dead in the water because it sprang a leak. Have you looked inside?

[Todd Madson]

Yeah, no leaks. It's just not working. Bringing it into Apple tonight right before 8 p.m.

And yes, I do have Applecare (3 years).

[Big Mac]

I would also assume it's the power supply, FWIW.

[Todd Madson]

That's their assumption. It's in the shop. Might be back as soon as tomorrow (when I'll be out of town) or next week sometime. Frak.

[Sherman Homan]

I hate paying for a warranty, but this is why they make 'em.

[Todd Madson]

Yes indeed, they said there was the possibility of the power supply, motherboard and cpus blown up
with this and that would be one expensive repair. I would be quite literally out of business and my
PC blew up earlier this week too. Interestingly, my sister-in-laws iMac G5 also had a bad power
supply earlier this week so it must be going around. "What can break, will..."

[reader50]

Originally Posted by Todd Madson 

... my PC blew up earlier this week too.
...

It might be time to invest in a good UPS. Your house may be subject to funny power.

[chris v]

Originally Posted by Todd Madson 

Tried. No lights, no power, no sound.

Damn. Right after "Resetting the PMU," the service manual pretty much takes off into "Replace the power supply, replace the logic board," etc. It takes one incident like this for that Applecare to pay for itself. I had the CPUs replaced twice in my QS dual 1.0 in its second year of extended warranty. Would have been over $800.00 without it.

[Todd Madson]

I didn't get a call yesterday and dropped by there this
afternoon since I was in the area.

They had a spare power supply, logic board and processors
as of yesterday and today I find out they threw all those
parts at it apparently and it STILL needs more parts.

I have a feeling that had I not had Applecare, I would
have been dead in the water more or less permanently
since I'm still paying for the darn thing.

Unreal. More info as I get it.

[Todd Madson]

Originally Posted by reader50 

It might be time to invest in a good UPS. Your house may be subject to funny power.

Well, that PC had other issues unrelated to power but I've
been running decent surge suppression in this place for years.

The wifes' computer didn't get hurt (iMac G4) and neither
did the work machine (Pentium M lappy).

I might just do a better surge supressor deal though after
this particular incident.

[dgstensby]

Funny, I just joined this forum because I have PowerMac 2.5 and I came home from work yesterday and it was dead, too. I am also covered by Applecare, but if you read the fine print, it says Apple does not cover (my paraphrase) "power-related events". I sure hope that Apple will fix this under Apple care.

[Todd Madson]

Holy crap!

I got a call from Apple today and they say they cover this but some weirdness is happening,
must have been some kind of catastrophic failure:

This is what was replaced:

-power supply
-motherboard
-both processors
-cooling system
-cooling system fascia (the cosmetic thing that says "g5 x 2" on it and the grille on the left side).

I wonder if something failed catastrophically in the cooling system killing everything?

I don't know about the condition of my data or if the drive had to be replaced too,
they didn't say.

I'm also concerned about the 2 gigabytes of aftermarket ram I added to the machine.

The guy on the phone said when I asked how much this would have cost had I
not had Applecare, he said $3000! That's more than I paid for the entire computer!

He said at that point you basically just call it a day and start over with a new machine.

I'm going to try and get some idea when I get there tonight as to what happened and
how to prevent it from happening in the future.

And also I'm going to have to unload the machine once the warranty expires because
$3000 is something I cannot afford under any circumstance, that's just insane.

More later after I get it back.

[reader50]

Maybe it's just me, but I'm seeing the signs of a sloppy diagnostic job. The fascia probably got broken by them during all the parts changes. For the other items, problems start one at a time. "some weirdness is happening" means they had trouble figuring it out, not that your system was somehow nonstandard.

I'm thinking it either started with the cooling system failing (possibly taking out the CPUs), or with the power supply blowing and feeding high voltage to everything else in the system. Hopefully it wasn't the 2nd possibility, because your HD will be toast. At least, the electronics board would be. The platters themselves are almost certainly OK.

[Todd Madson]

Then the HD would need replacing too - the guy said they'd ran it for 24 hours to make sure it was working properly but I guess I won't know the extent of the problems until I pick it up and test it at home.

Concerned now....hoo boy, this could be ugly.

[Sherman Homan]

"-power supply
-motherboard
-both processors
-cooling system
-cooling system fascia (the cosmetic thing that says "g5 x 2" on it and the grille on the left side)"

Just plain Wow! I agree with reader50, all of that stuff and the face plate? Doesn't seem likely!

[reader50]

Todd, look on the bright side. Courtesy of the new guy diagnosing your machine, you have a brand-new machine inside the case, other than the drives. You should be set for a long time.

[Todd Madson]

The machine is back and parts of it are working well and other
parts are not..

But first:

When I visited the store the tech actually came out to talk
to me because the repair sort of reached legendary status
in their office and had said that what had happened was the
liquid cooling system had leaked into the case and with no
cooling the cpus just eventually burned up and I suppose
took the power supply with it leading to a catastrophic
chain reaction of broken parts. Hmmm....

He claimed that that particular location had never seen this
kind of leak before.

The coolant didn't leak out of the case though which is weird,
just sat and pooled in the bottom.

Now, I use Temperature Monitor and no temps were out of the
ordinary. In fact, right now CPU a is 173 degrees fahrenheit
and CPU b is 179.5. The old processors CPU a was 171 or so
and CPU b would be in the 168 range - so this is higher.

Memory controller temp seems lower though, so we'll see.

Now, the problems:

One USB port doesn't appear to work on the rear of the machine.
But that's kind of minor compared to another issue:

Audio is completely non-functional - audio midi setup says
both input and output is not supported.

Sound in system preferences says there no input or output
devices available.

[Todd Madson]

I zapped the PRAM and the machine can see my external USB interface,
an M-Audio FastTrack guitar/mic recording interface but it can't see
any internal audio ins or outs.

Any ideas? I tried repairing permissions too and it did not help.

I also tried to run techtool but that was basically worthless for
testing onboard audio.

Ideas?

[reader50]

The HD might have gotten directory damage from the system going down so hard. Journalling can fix some of that, but can't fix hosed files.

Do an Archive & Install, bring it back up with a clean system. Then try again. The hardware is most likely fine now.

[Todd Madson]

Gnash. Really bad situation then. I'll have to borrow a drive from a friend since I'm dead out. Thanks for the idea then.

[Todd Madson]

Update:

Apple TS gave me a couple of suggestions:

Boot from the Tiger CD and run a disk repair on the boot disc.

Failing that, it's also a possibility that the connecting cables that connect the audio jacks on the
machine were not connected to the motherboard and thus would have to be connected.

My plan that I came up with at 0130 last night was to install Tiger on another external drive,
boot from it and see if the audio stuff shows. If it does, it's the boot drive. If it doesn't, it's
the machine.

Stay tuned.

[Todd Madson]

What a pain in the butt this has been. Last update (I think).

I booted from an external drive with Tiger on it at the store and it saw the
audio hardware and USB Ports.

I basically had to reinstall Tiger on my boot disc doing an archive install.

Took forever to get all of my software configured the way it was, or at least
the better part of the weekend.

Irritating.

Oh, I tried remoting into the box a little bit ago and it's not responding and
the router is. So, god only knows what's up now.

I do know that CPU B is running on average about 23-25 degrees (F)
hotter than the old one.

[reader50]

re - the remote login. OSX defaults to turning the 'net services off. Probably just need to mosey over to System Preferences -> Sharing.

[Buckaroo]

I am just now learning about Power Supply issues. I have a G5 Dual 1.8ghz. I have installed a Sonnet Tempo 4+4 (serial ata card) and a FirmTek SeriTek 1Se2 (serial ata card). They have been in my machine for a couple years now. I have the standard 2 hard drives installed, plus I have installed 4 additional hard drives internally and all 6 run just fine. With the 2 Serial ATA cards, I can run 6 external Serial ATA hard drives for a total of 12 hard serial ata hard drives. The only reason I bought the SeriTek was so I could boot off an external HD.

Anyhow, several months ago while hooking up a new external serial ATA HD to one of the external connectors (via disconnecting one of the first 12), I didn't pay any attention to the power connector, and I had problems for several months when ever I tried to power up the external HDs. Recently I decided to try to find out what was causing this problem. It seemed as if it was one drive that was giving me trouble, so I needed to identify it and get rid of it. I just happened to notice that my external PC 600 watt PowerSupply that I used to power all these external hard drives had 3 groups of power cables comeing out (amoung others), and each one of these had 3 connectors. The problem drive was connected with 2 other hard drives. It occured to me that I was over taxing one of these branches so I reconnected all the drives with 2 HDs per branch and everything seemed to work fine. Until tonight. Tonight, I received my ATI X800 XT video card to drive my new 30" Dell monitor. I was thrilled. I installed it and everything seemed to work fine for a little while, but then the internal hard drives kept dropping off line. It was a mess. It took me a couple hours to figure it out, and I have unhooked 2 internal hard drives and everything seems to be working fine. Aparently the new video card draws a lot more current and it was causing all this mess.

I know if my computer ever runs into the similar problem you had, the first thing I'll do is buy a new Power Supply. Now I need to figure out a way to power those 2 extra internal HDs so I can fix this problem.