[G4] All problems Fixed!

Mikey mikey1 at rcn.com
Tue Feb 21 18:02:34 PST 2012


You all might remember awhile back that I had the problem with my G4 MDD 
where it was taking 8 minutes to boot up.

One member asked me to post when I had fixed the problem to help others out 
with the same issue...so here goes:

Well, the boot problem turned out to be a bad SATA drive.  But, as  I was 
working on fixing that, the power supply conked out! (probably all those 
quick reboots with an old supply). So it looked like that was the end.

I was very close to junking the machine and buying a Mac Mini....BUT, I 
found a dealer on line who had a new, in box MDD Power Supply and fan. These 
were brand new...never even plugged in!!  Very cheap, too. I figured I 
couldnt lose.

So, I took a day off from work and did G4 MDD surgery. I replaced the Power 
Supply, the big fan, also the speaker (mine was distorted), and installed a 
160 gig IDE Drive I had. This got the machine back into service, then I 
flushed out the PRAM, formatted the drive and installed a fresh version of 
OSX 10.5.3 .
Then I did Software Update, and installed a newer version of Quicktime.

The end result is that the machine is like new. It boots up in 65 seconds, 
consistantly.

Since I still have the Sonnet SATA card in the machine, I plan to add Two 
SATA drives for storage. I may even upgrade the Dual 1 Gig processor to Dual 
1.25, I like the machine that much!

It felt good to get this old beast back into action. Works great, as well. 



More information about the G4 mailing list