G4 MDD Headache

Hi,

I'm frustrated as all ****, but I'm very determined to get this machine running right considering the time and resources I've thrown at it so far.

It's a G4 MDD w/ 1.25ghz PowerPC processor, oem 64mb raedon graphics card, and oem 80gb hard drive. I upgraded it to 2gb of ram. I installed a usb 2.0 card on it, and had to swap out the optical drive because it wasn't reading DVD's of any kind.

It has Leopard installed on it right now but is not running smoothly and has a bunch of old programs and stuff on it. I'd like to wipe it clean and format the disk, and reinstall Leopard on it since I have a retail copy. To reformat, you have to boot from disc. So here are my issues:

Holding 'C' does not work. For some reason, it takes about 30 seconds for the monitor to have any signal. And the light on the mouse comes on and off until about 30 seconds as well.. I hear the chime right away at boot but I see nothing for 30 seconds and then it's the thinking wheel.. which takes about 10 minutes to boot to desktop.

So, I figured I'd go into system preferences and startup disk and boot it to disk that way. Nope. Restarts to the thinking wheel for 10 minutes then tells me to hold the power button to restart it in every language.

I guess I'd like to know what is causing this 30 second delay, and also what is preventing me from booting to the disc before I go and get a fresh hard drive and/or processor or whatever the **** it needs.

Please help! And apologies to everyone for the long post.

G'day and welcome to the forums.

100% sure the DVD is a full retail install DVD, not a copy nor a silver grey model specific disc from a G5? The replacement optical drive was an ATAPI IDE drive? The memory you replaced was purchased from a Mac specialist as G4's are very fussy about memory and must have low density modules, not the cheaper high density found in Windows machines?

After that maybe the hard drive.

harryb2448 said:

G'day and welcome to the forums.

100% sure the DVD is a full retail install DVD, not a copy nor a silver grey model specific disc from a G5? The replacement optical drive was an ATAPI IDE drive? The memory you replaced was purchased from a Mac specialist as G4's are very fussy about memory and must have low density modules, not the cheaper high density found in Windows machines?

After that maybe the hard drive.

Click to expand...

100% full retail.

Replacement drive is an NEC nd-3550a- NEC website shows that yes, it is a ATAPI. The website Optical Drive ND-3550A Series [NEC] talks about it requiring Windows OS but I would doubt it..? I mean it installed 10.5 just fine.

As for the memory, I got it on ebay but made sure to match it exactly. Samsung oem ram and everything. I mean I could double check it.. I guess I'm not ruling that out.

That screen with many languages is a Kernel Panic. Those are often caused by RAM issues. Other things can cause it also. do you have the old RAM you can try and see if the issues go away?

This is the ram I installed. Matched perfectly (as far as I could tell) with the other two chips except for the b2 cb3. One of those numbers was different I think.

1GB Apple Power Mac G4 1.42Ghz MDD Memory PC2700 512MBX2 M368L6423DTM-CB3 | eBay