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G4 iMac - won't finish loading OS, hardware issue?
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Mar 2004
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I've got a buddy who's called me because his workhorse G4 iMac suddenly appears DOA. Here's the story as best I can summarize from my friend:
It's been chugging along fine, but seemed to be slowing down a bit lately. One day I turned the machine on, and the OS progress bar came up and completed, and then the OS started to display on the screen. However, I only got about 1.5" of the white menu bar at the top of the screen (on the right hand side) to show up- and that's it. The menu bar never finishes displaying to show me File/Edit/View, etc.... I never get a cursor, nor do I get desktop icons for folders, hard drives, etc. Nothing had changed recently that I can remember, and as far as I can remember the machine is stock as it came out of the box from Apple- no new hard drives or RAM, etc- ever.
So I had him reset PRAM & NVRAM, no luck. Then we hooked his Powerbook up to it via FireWire and he was able to pull data off the hard drive without any problems whatsoever (which is good, so the drive appears to be intact).
I also had him run disk utility on the drive, etc and it didn't come back with any real issues once it cleaned up a few permissions. Tried running permissions a few more times and rebooting, still no luck.
The one problem with the machine is the CD-ROM is busted, so I had him load the OS install disc on his powerbook and do a destination install on the iMac. Still didn't work, the machine will only boot in to that part of the OS load sequence and then it just hangs.
Anybody have any ideas? Thanks for the help guys and gals.
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A couple MacPro's, a MacBook Pro, a PC, and an iPod.
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: San Francisco
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Sounds familiar to me, anyway. Did you try unplugging the internet connection and restarting? I once had a similar symptom and it turns out that my DSL provider had a hiccup which stopped the OS from loading as it tried to connect. The machine start up was fine after I turned off the DSL box. After many calls to Earthlink, they did some magic on their end and the problem was fixed.
May be a long shot for your friend but worth a try.
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Last edited by hab; Aug 9, 2007 at 01:56 PM.
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21.5" iMac 2.7GHz i5; 15" FP iMac 0.8GHz G4, iPhone 5S
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Mar 2004
Status:
Offline
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Thanks for the tip hab. Hadn't tried that, but I'll ask my buddy to give it a whirl.
Any other ideas?
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A couple MacPro's, a MacBook Pro, a PC, and an iPod.
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