[simonjames]

Hi

hoping someone here may be able to help me with my G4 400MHz - last night it had a black bordered multi-lingual message box saying to reboot the machine by holding the power button for a couple of seconds or hit the reset button. I did this (a number of times) and each time the message returned.

I rebooted using an old system CD and got a message saying that the HD was unreadable and would I like to initialise it. Both Keyboard and mouse did not work.

So it looks like my HD has crashed - what is the best tool to try to resurrect it? Norton or Tech Tool?

Any pointers?

thanks in advance


Simon

[Kenneth]

DiskWarrior 3.0.2?

[Turnpike]

I had success with Norton a while ago with I think OS 9.0.4 ... from what I've read, though, Norton is more likely to screw you over even more than fix something under OS X.


Good luck.

[bstone]

Reboot holding down the shift the entire time. THis is called Safe Boot. See what happens. Let us know.

[Turnpike]

I did have a hard drive go bad once (coincidentally, in my G4 400 Sawtooth, although it wasn't the stock drive). Just to give you some piece of mind, once I fixed the drive (bad volume structure) all of my data was fine. I don't think it is too likely you will lose anything unless you reformat/initialize.

[simonjames]

thanks for the posts people

Safe boot didn't work - will try some more bits and get back with what happened

[Turnpike]

Another option would be to do a reinstall of the OS. I'm still not quite up to date on my low-level troubleshooting, but this should reinstall the kernel, which is the specific piece that is choking on you. If you do an "Archive and Install" of the OS, it will completely back up your /Users/ folder, and so any work saved there should be just fine. I don't think it will overwrite anything in the /Applications folder (with the possible exceptions of things that came with the OS... TextEdit and Safari and so on), either. I've not done any reinstalling of OS X (that pertains to your situation), so, again, I'd wait for confirmation from another poster... I'm mostly posting to make sure the idea gets out

Note that this would be an option you could use without paying for any disk repair software. From my experience, if you back up regularly, going the cheap road (not buying repair software) works just fine. If you don't back up, or want that extra peace of mind (this is where I fall!), then repair software is a good investment. It may not be necessary, when you have a problem it may not fix it, but dag gonnit, when something's going wrong, it sure is nice to know you've got something to pop in and try!


Again, good luck getting this fixed up!

[simonjames]

OK - have been trying for a while now without any luck. Here is what I have been trying to do to fix the unit - any suggestions as to what to do next would be appreciated.

Situation
G4 400 AGP
System HD 40Gb - not working
Data HD 80Gb - no problems
Original HD 10Gb - working OS 9

The 40Gb running the latest version of OS X gets the 'screen of death' - a multilingual black-bordered message "reboot by pressing the power button for a few seconds or hit the reset button"

Booting from an OS 9 CD works. Booting from any OS X disk (system software or disk warrior or tech tool pro) doesn't work - screen of death message. I get this error for both the 40Gb and 10Gb drives.

I swapped out the 40Gb for the 10Gb and the Mac would boot up in OS X until I tried to do a clean install of OS 9 which wiped the ability to switch back to OS X. I probably need to upgrade this to the latest version of 9. The OS 9 Disk Utility on the 40Gb drive comes up with multiple errors it can't fix but it does mount and all files are visible.

I tried to but could never do a clean install of OS X as the reboot would result in the screen of death.

I have zapped the PRAM. The system battery is less than a year old.

I am not sure what the next step is as every time I try to boot onto an OS X CD the screen of death appears.

Any suggestions? Happy to have both the 40 & 10G drives wiped.

[simonjames]

Solved!!!

OS X is not as forgiving with hardware problems as OS 9 is hence the reason why OS 9 would boot and OS X would not. This info courtesy of the Apple Store Broadway Sydney.

With this in mind I pulled out all ram; cleaned and re-seated. Ran DiskWarrior and voila - working better than the day I bought it.

Thanks to all who assisted with the resolution.

[[APi]TheMan]

The "screen of death" is a Kernel Panic. Sir, yes sir.

[simonjames]

Is it a 'nice' kernal panic? I have had others that are messages & codes dumped onto the screen without any formating or presentation.

Btw while I was trying to fix the problem the Mac booted into unix/Darwin on a number of occaisions.

[Turnpike]

It booted into the command line on its own? strange. Open Firmware, or full-on Darwin?

I've heard different things. Even the genius at the apple store said he didn't know the names (really made me confident, y'know? inspiring...). Best I can tell, the one where stuff just spits out onto the screen is a kernel exception. the multi-lingual message is a kernel panic. Other option I've heard is that they are both panics, one is just "graceful" and the other is "less graceful".

I read on some mac site (I think it was dated... Panther seemed to be in beta) that the one where stuff spits out is the KP from 10.1, but was replaced with the graceful version in 10.2. I've seen the nice one in 10.2 and the ugly one in 10.3, but one machine is rock solid (and no longer has 10.2 anyway) and my other machine lives in an Apple repair room.

[simonjames]

It booted into the command line after many many changes and reboots. I remember seeing 'Darwin' when the unix logon prompt appeared so I'd guess it was full on Darwin. And the short account name and password worked.

Strangely both styles of KP appeared during the struggle and always the OS was 10.3.4.

Wonder how much longer the G4 will continue to work for? Time will tell.