17" LCD iMac G4

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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! :D

Thanks,
Bill K.
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Pop the install disc in, and boot from that holding down 'C' and see if it starts. If so, go to Utilities, run Verify Disk and see what the report states. You will sson see if it is the HDD and install it yourself.

Do a Google for iMac 17" HDD replacement. Here is one link with illustrations:-

http://www.faqintosh.com/risorse/en/guides/hw/imac/g417hd/
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2.16 GHz C2D, 1GB Ram, MacBook White
I had that prob with my Mini just chucked it and brought a MacBook onstead
 
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Thank you both for your replies!

harryb2448: yeah i tried that. well, what i actually did was download AHT for this model of the iMac in a .dmg, use daemon tools to mount it as a drive on my PC, then burned it to a CD as though it were an .iso. i tried booting from a CD by holding "c" and also by holding the other key combo, something like "ctrl-apple-option-del". Because its not even getting that far when it turns on, it makes me think its the logic board...
 
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Does not look good.
 
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well, mac geniuses are nubs. i pulled out the HDD that they said was faulty and wanted to replace. i hooked it up as a secondary slave on my PC. the disk spun up, was recognized properly by my BIOS, and was mountable via MacDrive 7.

jesus, i really hate the apple store. =)
 
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An investment in DiskWarrior 4 might be the go. It is a great analysis and repair tool for hard drives.
 
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thanks, looks like a decent product. looks like i am going to have to buy a new mac for my wife though. the disk was fine, i bought a cheap enclosure for her old HDD, so she should be able to recover all of her data once we get her a new mac.
 
M

MacHeadCase

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Welcome to Mac-Forums, DeLorean81.

Careful with importing your wife's old files and apps though. New Macs come with OS X 10.5.x Leopard and a lot of old apps don't play nice with it.
 
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I just wanted to put some more info in here for anyone else that has this problem...

I ripped apart her machine, threw in an old 80gig HDD, and voila! I get that little folder icon with a flashing question mark, which I assume means it can't find the MBR or system files it expects to find. My wife has the OSX CDs at her workplace which she is going to bring home, and I'll try to load the OS on this drive.

So go figure, I guess the old mac boards can't even get through a freaking POST without a HDD attached? That would *NEVER* happen with a PC, and its so counter-intuitive to everything I've known that it makes me even more angry at macs. =) And at the "geniuses" at the apple store that wanted to charge me $350 for an 80 gig IDE internal drive.
 

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