[Mafoo]

Hello all,

Some strange things have been happening to my G4 MP/450 30+20Gb HDs 128ProATI TV+SCSI PCI Cards and a 15 inch Studio Display (ADC).

I came back from my lovely holiday and booted my G4 up, how i had missed it! To find that it randomly put itself to sleep! Very anoying. After much hassle and reinstalling the system the problem seems to have cleared up. (Though I fear that it is a hardware problem as the sleep light would sometimes flash during startup!)

Any way, the real problem is a few days befor I reinstalled my system I restarted my computer to find that the computer would load the system (I could make it shutdown and sleep by doing control-Eject to bring up the dialogue) but the screen would remain blank! And the proble persists. If i shut the computer down for about a minuite it somtimes clears it up, if i zap the Pram it usualy clears it up, but not all the time. the only guarenteed way to make it boot is to rest the motherboard, which i realy dont want to make a habbit of. Sometimes the monitor will come on and then turn off diring the boot process at 2 possible points... just after the screen flashes grey, and just when the system loads the startup screen with the progress bar. I will take my computer in in the next few weeks if the problem persists, but it would be realy nice if i didnt have to because it has a lot of work on it that i need, and it is my main graphics and web development machine.

Many thanks

Mafoo

[cygnusx1]

some sleep and startup problems can be caused by the PMU (power management unit) which is a little microcomputer on the motherboard that manages sleep, pram, power, etc. there's a little button right next to the battery on the mobo -- you can press it ONCE after the power cord has been unplugged for at least 10 seconds from the computer. wait at least 10 seconds before you plug the power cord back in. this is an extremely touchy process -- if it is screwed up, the battery will burn out in a couple of days and the computer probably won't boot. another thing to check is to make sure the battery is between 3.3 and 3.7 volts. both of these operations are not recommended to be done by untrained personnel, so don't tell your service guy what you did if the computer doesn't work.

about the monitor, graphics card extensions/drivers can do that. 99% of the time i've seen the color change just slightly as they load. in the other 1% the resolution gets changed causing the flashing you might be seeing.

good luck.

[Mafoo]

I have already reset the PMU, and it allows me to boot, until the computer restarts and then it all go messy.

im gona try removing all the PCI cards this week end. Tech tool cant find anything wrong with the RAM so im gona leave that alone.

Mafoo

[NeoMac]

I didn't realize the G4 had boots.


...oh boy, that's lame....i crack myself up sometimes...

[cygnusx1]

wow, that was pathetic!

anyway, if the computer gets through a boot just fine, then the system sounds bad -- or the hard drive (yikes), but tech tool should have found some of that stuff.