[X4U] iMac dead?

[Mary C. Youra]

On Jan 1, 2008, at 9:52 AM, Stroller wrote:

>
> On 31 Dec 2007, at 14:35, Mary C. Youra wrote:
>
>> We killed my mother's iMac G4 (the desklamp variety), and I'm  
>> wondering if there is any thing we can do to bring it back to  
>> working order, or if we should part it out?
>
> I'm sure working order is quite attainable.


Just an update to the saga of my mother's iLamp (originally ours),  
which I'd thought we'd killed by not letting Diskwarrior run long  
enough and repeated restarts (also getting the message from Disk  
Utility that Keys were Out of Order, and a B Tree error, but not  
fixable), target mode not finding a disk to reinstall on after  
Erasing the OS, so perhaps the Hard Drive had failed: I took it to  
the local Mac shop, telling them my tale of woe, and that I thought  
it was the hard drive, because when I tried it in target mode, I  
couldn't see a drive. They had it about four hours before calling me,  
saying that it was ready to be picked up. They told me they had  
"uncrossed the keys."  The tech who had worked on it wasn't  
available, so I'm not sure exactly how or what that entails, or  
whether they'd actually reinstalled the OS (10.4.11).

What I did discover when I booted it at home, was curious. The drive  
we thought had been erased was anything but. Restored were two Users  
which once had been deleted (before giving the iMac to my mother),  
along with all documents (I'm not sure about emails). In  my mother's  
User, her email settings were intact, but the email is missing. Her  
documents are there, though. Strange things were going on with the  
Keychains. I changed the passwords for all the Users with the Tiger  
cd, since none of them were working (perhaps the tech had needed them  
to be something else, I don't know). Once changed, I expected the  
Keychain to be set to the User password, but no. In one deleted user,  
it was what it had been reset to by that user previously. But, in my  
mother's case, we had to trash the whole login.keychain and have it  
recreate when the only two previous ones (and the new login) wouldn't  
work, even with uppercase (the only thing in the keychain was her  
email password, besides her login password). Both Safari 3 and the  
airport card or tcp/ip which had started this whole thing was still  
not working. I fixed Safari (first, I tried extracting Safari 3 with  
Pacifist, then reinstalled the whole update, thinking that might help  
with the tcp/ip thing, too. When that didn't work, I did what I  
should have done first--except I read the Apple Discussion for hints-- 
and trashed the Preferences. Success!), but the Airport or tcp/ip  
thing is still peculiar. I have played around with that, and gotten  
it to work intermittently--I reinstalled the 10.4.11 combo update,  
thinking it might have been the cause. Wireless has worked on  
occasion, but I haven't figured out why--once it worked after I'd  
trashed a file Diskwarrior told me was bad, but after restarting, it  
stopped working. I am of the mind that something in either that  
10.4.11 update or the Security Update was a problem, but it's not  
that big a deal right now, because my mother can use ethernet for her  
connection, which will be faster, anyhow.

This computer has only 512 mb of ram (her hard drive is big--160Gb).  
Is there a site where I can check to see how much it can take? If I  
want to take her to Leopard, for example, she would need more memory,  
wouldn't she? It might seem crazy, but Leopard might be the only way  
to surely fix the tcp/ip thing, too.

Many thanks to everyone who helped. I've learned a lot.

Mary