[spitty27]

I was able to get my hands on an old g4 and im trying to get the thing to boot but am having some issues.

It did not come with a harddrive, or a power supply. i picked up a matching power supply pulled from another g4 off ebay (model api1pc12), and a new pram battery. i currently don't have a spare harddrive for it, but it doesn't seem to be fully turning on. when the power is plugged in and i plug in a monitor via vga, the monitor makes some static noise, as if its preparing to show an image, so it recognizes that its being plugged into a graphics card.
however, when i hit the power button, nothign really happens. i opened the latch to see what was going on. the fan starts spinning up, and a red light on the motherboard shines bright. when i plug in the optical drive, it makes an additional noise on startup, but i am unable to get the drive to eject the tray so i can put in a mac os x install disc. iv'e tried putting my laptop in target disk mode, and then booting the g4 with option down - so i can select the laptop as a boot source, but nothing shows up on the plugged in monitor. i have a feeling that the supply works, but there is another issue. could it be that the motherboard is faulty? maybe the graphics card? there seems to be an older rage card installed as well. there is also a single 512mb ram chip. doesn't really seem like anything is missing beside the harddrive, but what stumped me was that when i plugged in a drive i know is fried (makes the clicking noise in an external case), on boot, i don't even get that. is power even running through the motherboard? im pretty sure i plugged everything in correctly - power to the board, power to the fan, power to the optical, power to the harddrive, and ran the ide cable to connect to the optical, and the ata coming form the mother board to the harddrive.

im not getting any startup chime, but the light does shine behind the power button. plugging in a keyboard and hitting the power on the keyboard seems to turn the machine on as well.

really looking forward to getting this thing working, so all help is greatly appreciated. i can post pictures of the insides if that will help (unless somebody knwos the issue off the bat).

thanks!

[reader50]

Holding the mouse button down during boot will cause the optical drive to open.

If you push the power button and wait, does the button blink at you afterwards? If so, how many blinks? It's a diagnostic readout.

[spitty27]

yeah i've tried that but no luck. since posting, i tried releasing the heatsink so i could reseat the proccesor card but now im not even seeing the fan turn on when i hit the power button. i've removed the battery, hit the pmu reset and everything, but it looks like i've moved backwards. i pressed down on the processor and reattached the heatsink and can't think of any other reasons why the fan won't even turn on anymore.

any ideas short of buying a new motherboard?

thanks