G5 only gives me a gray screen (with apple logo)

Greetings all. I have a new iMac but I occasionally use my old Power Mac G5. Lately it's been freezing when I try to open big files, and just today it wouldn't fully start up after a freeze. I get a gray screen with the Apple logo. After three tries I got just a blank black screen. I also notice if I wait and hope something will become of the gray screen, the fan starts to gradually run real high. So I shut everything down and left the house and came back a few hours later--and I got it to turned on completely. The first thing I did was do a secure trash dump as I knew I had quite a few files in there. It actually looked as if it would take about an hour to completely trash everything so I left the room. 20 minutes later I heard the fan running high again which, I assume, signifies the computer just went stagnant again in the middle of the permanent trashing.

I really, really don't have much of ANYthing on the harddrive at all, so it's not like the computer's being maxxed out. Although it has seen almost ten years of hard labor though.

So is there a solution to not only getting it back on so I can continue dumping the trash, but also from solving this whole dilemma of it not coming on? Is there any downloadable software for old G5s I can apply to this problem once I get the computer back on?

Thanks very, very much for any and all help.

Les

Les Toil said:

...I occasionally use my old Power Mac G5. Lately it's been freezing when I try to open big files, and just today it wouldn't fully start up after a freeze. I get a gray screen with the Apple logo. After three tries I got just a blank black screen.

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Up to this point I'm thinking a dead hard drive.

Les Toil said:

So I shut everything down and left the house and came back a few hours later--and I got it to turned on completely.

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This was positive. This may mean that your hard drive may be on the verge of dying.

Les Toil said:

The first thing I did was do a secure trash dump as I knew I had quite a few files in there. It actually looked as if it would take about an hour to completely trash everything so I left the room.

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This probably wasn't a very good first move. Once you got the computer running...the VERY first move would to have copied all important files off this hard drive (if you don't have a backup of them already) BEFORE the hard drive completely "kicks the bucket"!

Also...sometimes when emptying the trash (with a very large amount of files in the trash)...problems can occur. Why...I'm not sure...just that it happens (maybe it's becasue the hard drive it getting old & about to die). I find it's better to erase smaller batches of files.

Les Toil said:

I really, really don't have much of ANYthing on the harddrive at all, so it's not like the computer's being maxxed out. Although it has seen almost ten years of hard labor though.

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Ten years of hard labor can definitely equal close to being a dead hard drive. Since there is nothing on this hard drive of importance...I would (two options):

Option #1:

- boot the computer from an OS install DVD
- reformat the drive
- reinstall the OS
- then run the computer to see if you have any sort of long-term stability

Option #2:

Consider this hard drive "fried"...buy a new one...install the OS onto it...then "Keep on Trucking"!

- Nick

Well, I backed up everything a while ago. I guess it's definitely on its last leg--if not already kaput! Thanks much for the input Pigoo. Much appreciated.

Anyone has a used iMac they wanna sell??

By the way pigoo3, would you consider a Mac Mini a stronger computer over the first model G5--as far as memory and RAM? I guess considering how lathargic the ol' thing got, ANYthing would be an improvement. It would just be used to display 400MB photoshop files and maybe do a few tweeks on those art files on Photoshop. And for watching Netflix.

Thanks again for you input!

Les

Les Toil said:

By the way pigoo3, would you consider a Mac Mini a stronger computer over the first model G5--as far as memory and RAM?

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Depends what model Mac-Mini you are talking about. Mac-Mini's have been around since 2005...so hard to know what you are thinking about.

"Memory" and ram are the same thing. Hard drive storage space is not "memory".

- Nick

I own two PowerMac G5s and this has happened to both of them in the last two months. Boots to Apple logo screen, sits there for quite a while but never starts to boot off of hard drive and eventually the fans wind up to full speed and it stays like that.

In BOTH cases, the issue was a bad RAM SIMM.

In the first case, I am not quite sure what inspired me to check this, but something did, so I took ALL the RAM out and just put in one set. Attempting to reboot produced the same "full throttle fans" symptoms. I took the initial pair of SIMMs out and tried the next set of two (there were four sets total in mine - they were maxed out). On the third try, it booted fully. After that it was a task of mix and match until I found the bad SIMM, which took a while. I eliminated that full set, and the machine has been stable (minus 2 GB of RAM of course) ever since.

In the case of the second one doing this, I recognized the symptom and knew what to do, and again, I found bad RAM.

I would recommend pulling it all out, and trying it two SIMMs and at a time until you either exhaust all your RAM, in which case it is not the RAM, or you achieve stability again. Good luck!