Calling all Mac users - weird G4 problem

[Oleg Volk]

Tried booting my G4/350 today -- got a gray screen and a high-pitched musical tone (similar to disconnected phone signal but higher in tone). The computer won't boot further. I called Mac Authority in Nashville, they had no idea what it could be. Any leads on getting this figured out?

Thanks.

Update: I booted it from OS9 CD (it won't boot from OS X CD for some reason). The main hard drive is gone. Not sure how to even start trying to recover data from it. Have backups of most things, but really would like to get it back up. USB CD drive and Firewire DVD drive won't read.

[Felonious Monk/Fignozzle]

Yeah, that's similar to what you get when you pull 'em out of the box, and try to boot directly from a network drive by holding down the N key.

I'm just not a Mac guy enough to really know, but I'm fairly confident that you're NOT hosed.
You MAY, however, need to get knowledgeable assistance (as in pay the $39 or whatever) for some phone support from Apple.  Mac probably has some user community forums someplace that I'd check first, though.
Sorry I can't be of more help.

[Oleg Volk]

It booted OK from OS9 CD. I then tried to boot from the second internal drive. Now it freezes on startup AND won't go back to booting from CD. Not sure how to fix that.

[charby]

I had a G5 that gave me similar fits ended up being bad RAM chip

Charby

[Oleg Volk]

How could I force it to boot from CD again?

[Guest]

Now you see why I'm not a fan of the mac I have a friend I'll call for you, he's a certified Mac tech.

-Matt.

[Oleg Volk]

Thank you, Matt. I am glad I got the PC now, but all of my old work was done in XPress and now I have to re-do it in InDesign. InDesign won't import anything from version 5 of XPress. Also, some of my email archives, though escaped archiving...my backups are probably 90% good and I'll find out which 10% are missing over time. My colleciton of fonts, utilities and the like, which I built up over several years, has to be started fresh.

[charby]

hold down the C key when you start up

[mfree]

Hold the "C" key down during boot to force a CD boot. hold "apple-T" down to turn the entire computer into a firewire drive, for data recovery.

[Oleg Volk]

Holding down C does not work anymore. It worked earlier, now it just freezes on startup. Thanks for the appt-T hint, would be useful for later. Maybe I'll take this Mac to work and connect it to the Mac there.

[charby]

Computers and computer parts are fun to shoot at....

Something to consider!

Charby

p.s. could you slave the SCSI drive into the mac at work?

[Standing Wolf]

Holding down C does not work anymore.

When all else fails, hold down the option key during start up. If that doesn't do the trickdon't be surprised if it doesn'topen the box, remove all the RAM, replace it, and try again. If that doesn't work, disconnect one of the hard drives and try again. If that doesn't work, disconnect the other hard drive and try again. If that doesn't work, disconnect the CD or DVD drive and try again. If that doesn't...

See what I mean? Any one item of hardware can hash up the entire machine. It may well be worth your while to remove the hard drive(s) and see whether they work in another computer.

Once upon a time, Apple made the tip-top best computers with the tip-top best operating system. Now it's down in the same murk with Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and the rest of the bottom feeders.

[garrettwc]

Oleg, did you insult the computer gods this week?

First your WinXP wouldn't recognize your new motherboard, now your G4 is Tango Uniform.

Hope you can recover everything.

[lee n. field]

Or you could try holding down apple-s, to boot OSX to a single user unix prompt.  If that works (doubt it will, given your description), there's some things you can try.

[Ben]

If it is your drive dying versus an OS or other hardware issue: If you have, or can borrow one, put the drive in an external enclosure and plug it into another computer. You can often recover the data from the good sectors of the drive that way. The sooner the better if you try it though -- each restart of a failing drive, especially if the OS is partially in bad sectors, brings you that much closer to critical and pretty unrecoverable failure.

[Oleg Volk]

I can now boot it in OS 9.1 from the original drive. It won't read my external Firewire drive or burn to DVDs on an external burner. Will try CDs in another USB burner. Trouble is, the main 80GB drive seems to be missing outright. Not sure how to test it or try to recover it. Not many Macs around here to serve as host cases.

PS: I booted from the OSX CD and ran the disk first aid repair program. It can see the drive...but as empty, unformatted one. Not sure how to remedy that. It won't repair or verify, all options are grayed out.

[lee n. field]

Computers and computer parts are fun to shoot at....

Something to consider!

A recent Mac?  NFW!  Send it to me.  

PS: I booted from the OSX CD and ran the disk first aid repair program. It can see the drive...but as empty, unformatted one. Not sure how to remedy that. It won't repair or verify, all options are grayed out.

That sounds like the situation I ran into with a customer's computer once (a school, with their grading program information, classes all set up, etc., a week away from the start of school.  No pressure :-).    What I ended up doing to fix it was to hook this drive in as second drive on another Mac, and from a command prompt ran an osx variant of the unix fsck (fsck.hfs, I think.   file system integrity checker tool -- equivalent to Winders chkdsk) command, to rebuild the hfs catalog.  After this, the drive mounted properly, all the files were there, and when I put it back in the machine it came from it booted properly.

Even failing something like that, files can be retrieved by a data recovery service, but that gets expensive.


Oleg -- if you want details on what I did, I can look them up.  Whatever you do, don't do anything yet that actually writes out to this disk.