Member Avatar for joeu

Hi, I have a dual 1.8 Powermac G5. The thing has been freezing a lot, ever since i bought it. Hard freeze, no spinning pinwheel. After taking it in several times I have been told every excuse: it was my monitors, memory, faulty harddrive...yet replacing all of these has not fixed my problem at all.

Recently the grey-ed out "must power down now" screen has been popping up from time to time. The MAJOR problem is that after the last time I did this, now my g5 won't turn back on at all. I've unplugged the power cord, external devices....but now when i turn it on, it won't go past the black screen (I don't even get the grey apple loading screen). It just stays on black and if I leave it on the fans start running. Hitting eject will not open the cd/dvd drive, so I cannot boot up off a disk.

Any suggestions!? Even if this thing needs to be serviced i have a Final Cut Pro project file that I really need off this thing. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by d2legitgod
Member Avatar for John A

Hello,

From what I can tell, this is either a RAM problem, or, more likely, a motherboard problem. Why? Because if a hard drive is not present or not working, a normal Mac would show a flashing question mark. Not being able to get to the gray screen means that your Mac has serious problems.

  • To open the cd drive, I believe you can use a straightened paperclip to manually open the drive and insert a disk
  • If booting from the CD drive works fine, this points to some kind of hard disk problem, and you should run checks on it with Disk Utility. (I highly doubt this will work.)
  • If you can't get it booted, I would say the best thing to do right now is get the hard drive backed up by putting it in another machine (SCSI equipped) if you have one, or bringing it into your local Mac dealer. Then get your Mac assesed by a technician.
Member Avatar for d2legitgod

Hi there

I also have a power Mac g5 duel 2.7Ghz loaded up with 3.5Gb of ram and a ATI X800 graphics card. Just like you my Mac had the same problems with starting up except the freezing. Basically I had a power surge which caused the Mac to be incompetent. They changed every main bit of hardware in the computer and it still wouldn't work. In the end after going through 3 23 inch screens and multiple graphics cards and memory it turned out to the problem was the power adapter.

If your Mac wont start up, pull the slot down on the DVD drive and use a paper clip like joeprogrammer said and try to reinstall your operating system if the changing your power adapter doesn't work. When reinstalling you can save your files to newly installed operating system. I can’t remember the hot key to start up off the CD drive because I now use PCs but I think if you hold down C when starting up it might work.

Hope this helps

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