Mac G4 Mirror Door will not boot

Do not know if this is a hardware or software issue.

Started up the Mac today and it hung; showed the wallpaper, but would not load the toolbar, icons, etc. - just the little hourglass thing.

Held the start button to shut down. On restart, get no start chime and eventually get a message in several languages instructing to restart the computer.

Reset the PRAM and something else though open firmware. Got the start chime again, but still the same message to restart. Also tried pulling and replacing the motherboard battery - get the chime again, but still no boot.

Tried booting from a bootable cd/dvd holding the 'c' key, but it will not start from the cd/dvd and the result is the same restart message.

I need some help, please. This is a G4, mirror doors, max memory, struggling to run Leopard.

Thank you.

The machine is going into "kernel panic". That's usually caused by defective hardware. How about trying to boot it in safe mode to see if it will start? Hold down the shift key as soon as you hear the chime. If you can get it to start in safe mode, go to the panic log and copy it to the clipboard then post it here so we can take a look at it.

Thank you, chscag.

Unfortunately, could not start in safe mode. After 6 or 7 minutes it gave up and displayed the "You need to restart..." screen.

You do hear the hard drive spin for a moment and the cd/dvd drive, but no good result.

Any suggestions on the possible hardware issue?

If the hard drive still works, can I take it to a PC to read and recover files?

Thanks,

Bill

Do you have another Mac or one that you could borrow? If so, you may be able to use Firewire Target Disk Mode to gain access to the hard drive data in the G4. You won't be able to read the data on the HD from a PC without a third party application and driver such as MacDrive.

Your G4 appears to have some serious hardware issues. Hopefully someone who is more familiar with that model may be able to come up with some ideas for you.

Mac will not boot

Bump.

missed your message about cross posting. I assume it is not desireable. If so, how do I get the hardware afficionatos to take notice?

I moved the entire thread to the hardware section: "Apple Desktops" and clarified the title somewhat. Hopefully that will get you some more replies.

As a note: If you think your post is in the wrong forum, rather than cross post ask a staff member to move it for you.

Thanks.

For starters replace the PRAM battery. Noted problem with MDD when the battery is flat they will not boot. After that on to bigger, and more expensive problems such as mono and power supply.

Last gasp here.
was able to view the hard drive on an old PC and recover files with MacDrive. (not quite so easy as you have to find one that still has scssi)
Replaced the battery.

Review of symptoms:
Will not boot; not from the hard drive, not from the optical drive.
You get a chime, a screen, then a restart suggestion in 4 languages.
You can get to open firmware.
Optical drives spin, but cannot boot the computer.

It seems all of the electro-mechanical bits are fine.

Any suggestions?

Thank you all,

Bill

argusp said:

You get a chime, a screen, then a restart suggestion in 4 languages.

Click to expand...

thats a kernel panic, which usually means that this:

It seems all of the electro-mechanical bits are fine.

Click to expand...

is not actually the case. Kernel Panics generally mean a hardware failure at some point.

you could try taking out a module of RAM, seeing if its a faulty stick.

Thank you, Rob.
By electro-mechanical was trying to differentiate things that move, like drives, compared to solid state bits, like memory chips. Even tried booting without the keyboard or mouse to elimiate those mechanical things, too.
tried removing memory as you suggested, swapping about, etc., but no change. In open firmware, the memory properties display as expected.

I was trying to see if the Open Firmware could do some device diagnostics, but do not know enough about it to be dangerous (yet). For example, probe-scsi is not recognized, nor is probe, scsi, ata.

Any other suggestions?

Thank you.