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Hello to everyone.
I bought my wife this iMac about 6 years ago and we've been pretty fortunate in that we've only had a few minor problems with it. Until now.
It started with her complaining that it was running very slow. As she rebooted it (which she said had fixed it in the past), it would not boot. In fact, it will not even get through the POST. It chimes once, then I see the caps lock light on the keyboard illuminate, and then go out. Immediately after that, the LCD screen goes 'grey'. I took it to the Apple store, and they swear its a HDD problem, but I'm not so sure. First of all, its not even getting all the way through a POST, I can't boot it from a CD, and when they tried to mount an external HDD to it at the store and boot from that at startup, it froze on the very first screen. The little watch thing spun around for about a minute, then it locked up. I can't get into single user mode, and none of the other boot key combinations produced any behavior different than the one I described above.
There is no way on God's green earth I am paying them $350 to replace a $90 SATA drive, only to find out its probably the logic board (which they quoted as $600). I am considering doing the following, in this order:
- opening it up and cleaning out all the dust, and securing all cable connections
- buying a G4 logic board (found one on ebay for $50) and trying to replace that myself
- if that doesn't work, i'll go buy a SATA drive and put that in
- if all else fails, looks like i will be buying my wife a new Mac
Can anyone give me any insight on this problem, diagnose the symptoms, offer probable solutions? Any help would be much appreciated!
Thanks,
Bill K.
I bought my wife this iMac about 6 years ago and we've been pretty fortunate in that we've only had a few minor problems with it. Until now.
It started with her complaining that it was running very slow. As she rebooted it (which she said had fixed it in the past), it would not boot. In fact, it will not even get through the POST. It chimes once, then I see the caps lock light on the keyboard illuminate, and then go out. Immediately after that, the LCD screen goes 'grey'. I took it to the Apple store, and they swear its a HDD problem, but I'm not so sure. First of all, its not even getting all the way through a POST, I can't boot it from a CD, and when they tried to mount an external HDD to it at the store and boot from that at startup, it froze on the very first screen. The little watch thing spun around for about a minute, then it locked up. I can't get into single user mode, and none of the other boot key combinations produced any behavior different than the one I described above.
There is no way on God's green earth I am paying them $350 to replace a $90 SATA drive, only to find out its probably the logic board (which they quoted as $600). I am considering doing the following, in this order:
- opening it up and cleaning out all the dust, and securing all cable connections
- buying a G4 logic board (found one on ebay for $50) and trying to replace that myself
- if that doesn't work, i'll go buy a SATA drive and put that in
- if all else fails, looks like i will be buying my wife a new Mac
Can anyone give me any insight on this problem, diagnose the symptoms, offer probable solutions? Any help would be much appreciated!
Thanks,
Bill K.