[Silencer]

I have an old iMac 400mhz, slot load, and all of a sudden the other day it has stopped working, I tried to turn it on and nothing happened, pulled the power from the wall socket and plugged it in another socket and the imac turned on but it seems as soon as the hard drive spins up theres a almost popping sound and it turns off, it wont do this again unless i unplug the power and put it in another socket

The pop i heard sounded electrical so its probably something do do with the power supply, but i have no idea.

Anyone got any info or advice on how I might fix it and get it up and running? otherwise i'm gonna have to buy an external hard drive case to grab the info from the drive and put it on my ibook, which involves spending money which I dont really want to do.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Krusty]

Do you have a bootable system CD lying around somewhere ? If its a power supply problem, this may not work, but if its a hard drive problem you may be able to boot from the CD (hold the "C" key when you turn it on to force it to used the CD instead of hard drive). Once the "Installer" from the CD boots up, you can usually go up into the File menu and go straight to disk utility.

Also, if you have a 400mhz DVSE (1st gen) it probably didn't come with a hardware test CD but if this was a lower-end, 2nd Generation iMac, it should have had a hardware test CD -- you can force boot from this as well (using the "C" key thing). Basically, if it came with a puck mouse, it won't have that CD .. if it came with the Pro Keyboard and Optical mouse, it will.

Best of luck. I have a DV+ 450 that I use as a server and I dread the day it finally chokes on me.

[Silencer]

The computer shuts off after about 3 seconds, not even enough time for the HD to spin up fully, so getting a cd in wouldn't work because it shuts off too quickly.

[Krusty]

Originally posted by Silencer:
The computer shuts off after about 3 seconds, not even enough time for the HD to spin up fully, so getting a cd in wouldn't work because it shuts off too quickly.

Oh ... darnit !!! Did you try starting in target disk mode ? Probably won't work ... but its worth a shot.

[sideus]

Sounds like an analog/video power board problem.

[Silencer]

Originally posted by sideus:
Sounds like an analog/video power board problem.

Hmm that sounds expensive , I think my iMacs finally hit the dust, I'm just gonna try and salvage the hard disk because its got about 50gbs of music on there as i was using the iMac as a jukebox.

But Dammit!