Power Mac G4 Won't Boot Up

3994 Views 4 Replies 4 Participants Last post by krs, Jul 18, 2007

The Officer

Discussion Starter · Jul 17, 2007

So today in the course of normal surfing I tried to open text edit to copy some text and it wouldn't launch. Then I tried to open another app and it didn't work either so I decided to restart. Now suddenly I can't get past the blue "starting OS X" page.

I tried resetting PRAM and there is no change. fsck says everything seems okay but I still can't boot up. I tried going into target mode and trying to run disk utility or diskwarrior off of a G4 ibook but I can't seem to get into target mode. Safe Mode doesn't seem to work either.

I don't know what to do next.... maybe I need OS X cds to boot from to reset prefs? I don't have them readily available.

It's a Power Mac G4 running OS X (10.4.9). It's a bit of an old and slow system but I haven't had any big issues. Any help is greatly appreciated.

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HowEver

· #2 · Jul 17, 2007

Do you have a external FireWire drive you can start up from? If that works, you can examine your internal hard drive; I think that's where the problem lies.

(Oh, and "welcome" on the occasion of your first post--these several years. Hope this works out.)

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The Officer

Discussion Starter · #3 · Jul 17, 2007

I don't have an external drive but I can use my girlfriends if it will help. Although I am not sure how it will, it doesn't have an OS on it.

Also, I can see my Mac through our home network and look into my 2 internal drives. On my main drive there is a folder of "damagedfiles"... Is there some way I can do repairs over the network?

(thanks for the welcome HowEver I have read a lot of posts and gotten great info over the years but leave the advice up to all the pros)

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CanadaRAM

· #4 · Jul 18, 2007

Boot from your OSX install disk, and install OSX on you 2nd (good) internal hard drive. Then you can start repairs./filerecovery on the main drive.
DiskUtility Repair Disk should be your first step

TechTool Pro or DiskWarrior for directory corruption that Disk Utility can't handle. DataRescue X for scavenging files off the drive,

Do not attempt to install anything on the main drive until it has a clean bill of health.

Be prepared to buy a new IDE 120 Gb hard drive (I don;t think your machine supports drives larger than 128 Gb off the motherboard IDE connection)

O'course, your first step is to get the OSX disks, you;re kind of snookered without them. If you had upgraded your machine from borrowed disks, then now's the time to bite the bullet and purchase a retail OSX.

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krs

· #5 · Jul 18, 2007

CanadaRAM said:
Be prepared to buy a new IDE 120 Gb hard drive (I don;t think your machine supports drives larger than 128 Gb off the motherboard IDE connection)

Depends on the particular G4. The 128 GB limitation disappeared mid 2002.
Macintosh: Using 128 GB or Larger ATA Hard Drives

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