[X4U] DRAM failure (was Hard drive or hard drive controller gone)

[Eric Morrison]

Hi:

You may have already tried all these things but if you haven't it may be
worth a shot.

Have you reset the pram? (boot holding down Apple Option P R until it chimes
three or four times and then let it start normally)

Definitely boot into open firmware (boot holding down Apple Option O F) and
type the following with a return after each line:

reset-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all

after the last return the machine will reboot.

Also, try simply unplugging the machine from all electrical power for an
hour and then plug it back in and try again.

Finally, not sure if this machine has it, but on some of these machines
there is a reset switch on the motherboard. It's a tiny little switch
somewhere on the motherboard. If it were me, I would search that out to see
if there is one and if there is, press it (I believe you should unplug the
machine before doing so). I've had machines that wouldn't boot at all and
simply pressing this button completely resolved the problem.

Finally, unconnect and reconnect connectors inside the machine. May simply
be a bad connection between some components.

You may have a bad motherboard... in which case this is all for naught...
but then again, you might not!

Good luck.

... e


On 1/17/06 1:38 PM, "Jim Robertson" <jamesrob at sonic.net> wrote:

> On 1/16/06 7:40 PM, "John Baltutis" <baltwo at san.rr.com> wrote:
> 
>> That's a pretty good price for DRAM and that's a pretty good machine. BTW,
>> can't you return the bad ones? Most suppliers have lifetime guarantees on
>> those
>> modules.
> 
> The $75 price was from the Chip Merchant. It's more like $100 from crucial.
> My problem is that my son's MDD G4 may no longer be "a pretty good machine."
> One hard drive has failed, one DIMM slot may have failed, and two DRAM
> modules seem to have failed in fairly short order. Also, neither of the 512
> MB sticks were purchased from top-tier sources, so I doubt I'd be able to
> return either for credit.
> 
> Curiously, when the machine contains ONLY the 256 MB DRAM stick from Apple
> and it runs memtest in single user mode, it's happy to do so for hours on
> end, but even with that module living alone in the box, running Mac OS X
> 10.4.4 it will freeze up within a few hours.
> 
> I'm now running (or sitting) with the machine booted from the Tiger
> installer DVD-Rom doing nothing. Disk Utility doesn't find anything wrong
> with the new Seagate 300 GB drive's volume, permissions repair just fine.
> I'm running out of ideas to sort out what's wrong.
> 
>> I don't understand the "can't use" bit with the 300 GB HD. Put it into
>> something like the Argosy USB/FW enclosure ($38 + S&H) and it should work
>> with
>> any of your machines.
> 
> Now THAT's a great idea. Struggling with this the past several days has
> rekindled my notion that there cannot be too many backups, and what I do now
> for my dual 1.8 GHz G5 is backup to another SATA drive inside the same box.
> Backing up to an external drive as well sounds like a smart idea.
> 
> Jim Robertson


Eric Morrison
Insigniam Performance
Catalyzing Breakthough Results
www.insigniam.com
1.610.667.7822

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